How (and why) Biden should overcome the Supreme Court to end the debt showdown

Bonus: it’ll also kill Trump’s alarmingly good chances for a second term.

Cory Doctorow
7 min readMay 26, 2023

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A kitchen sink. The Supreme Court building protrudes from it. Behind the sink is a window. Joe Biden grins from the other side of the window. Image: Joe Ravi (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_Building_at_Dusk.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

I’m coming to the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in HAY-ON-WYE with my novel Red Team Blues:

I’m at OXFORD’s Blackwell’s on May 29 at 7:30PM with Tim Harford.

Then it’s Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, and Berlin!

Is it legal for Congress to default on the US national debt? It depends on who you ask. There are a ton of good legal arguments for and against, so perhaps it comes down to what the (degraded, corrupt, illegitimate, partisan) Supreme Court says?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/biden-administration-debt-republican.html

Put in those terms, it seems like the game was over before it began. Biden should just surrender, hand the most extreme wing of the (degraded, corrupt, illegitimate, authoritarian) Republican Party whatever it wants, even if doing so will push Biden’s approval rating even lower, dangerously close to the next federal election.

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