#x-day

There are clear majorities in support of the Build Back Better agenda, and even for the watered down Machin Synematic Universe version we got through the Infrastructure Bill. If the Dems could mobilize voters — by convincing them that they were committed to doing things rather than capitulating — they could win strong majorities in 2024. Even in the gerrymandered, antimajoritarian America, electoral wins are possible — they just require overwhelming turnout, rather than the 50.00001% “victories” favored by “data-driven” Democratic consultants (victories that leave the party incapable of governing, and let monsters like Joe Manchin hold the entire nation hostage).

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe doing things won’t mobilize voters. But if we’re already going to stipulate that without significant majorities, the real President of the United States is the three-headed monster (Gorsuch, Thomas, and Roberts), and the billionaires who yank their chains, then what do we have to lose?

There are a lot of things that Biden could try to get through the debt ceiling crisis without giving up on the promises he made to the American people and the programs the American Congress passed. Here’s a couple interesting ones, courtesy of Brad DeLong:

“The Federal Reserve might simply record a negative balance in the Treasury account,” then create an “overdraft” account and pay the US’s obligations out of it;

The Fed could tell retail banks trying to clear government checks that the checks didn’t clear, and the banks could tell their depositors, “ your Treasury check has bounced, but do not worry, we have credited your account, anyway, and will handle this, and please be very grateful to us.”

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/debt-ceiling-what-are-e-fallback

Of course, there are lots of other possibilities: Biden could issue an Executive Order to the effect that the Debt Ceiling violates the 14th Amendment. Or that it violates the Contracts Clause. Or he could order the Treasury to start issuing coupon-free bonds. Or he could just mint the coin:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/23/23734654/government-debt-default-trillion-dollar-platinum-coin

Yes, each of these would end up in front of the (degraded, corrupt, illegitimate, partisan) Supreme Court, who would very likely strike them down.

But writing for The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper argues that this could still be sound tactics:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-05-25-democrats-fear-supreme-court/

If Biden does something about the debt default, and the Supremes block it, then the default is their fault. What’s more, it’s a mess they absolutely do not want to get into, like deciding which of the US’s creditors will and won’t get paid when they sue over the default. And if the court won’t do it, will they give the president the power to “just pick and choose what gets paid? That would give him a de facto line-item veto over the entire budget, and the Court has already ruled that a law explicitly giving him that power is unconstitutional”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._City_of_New_York

Basically, if the Supreme Court kills Biden’s attempt to resolve the budget crisis, then it becomes the Supreme Court’s problem, as everyone owed a federal payment “say, Social Security beneficiaries or military contractors,” brings a case — “There would be tens of millions of such potential litigants.”

So what should Biden do?

Call their bluff.

First, mint the coin. If the court strikes that down, issue coupon-free bonds. If the court strikes that down, declare debt ceilings to violate the 14th Amendment. If the court strikes that down, declare it to violate the Contracts Clause. Keep doing it. Throw in every solution including the kitchen sink — but never give into the GOP’s demand for Biden to violate his promise to the American people and unilaterally tear up laws establishing programs that make our lives better.

This is what Lincoln did when the Supreme Court blocked his attempts to end slavery. It’s what FDR did when they blocked the New Deal. The court doesn’t have an army, it can’t force its decisions on the American people. It doesn’t have a bureaucratic workforce and it can’t take over the administrative branch — hell, they don’t even have the keys to the office buildings.

The Supreme Court’s power comes from its legitimacy, not force of arms, and while they may not act like it, the Supremes know in their bones that without legitimacy, they are nothing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/25/consequentialism/#dotards-in-robes

The justices in stolen seats have made it clear that they consider themselves to be “a de facto super-legislature that rules in favor of its own partisan policy objectives based on tendentious up-is-down reasoning or no reasoning at all.” This is an illegitimate proposition.

The Supreme Court can’t get any less legitimate. If Biden were to ignore the Supremes and make good law in the teeth of their pronouncements, it couldn’t make the situation any worse than it is today. The Supremes have set themselves against labor law, against climate resiliency, against bodily autonomy, against political accountability, against the rule of law itself. We should not — we must not — cede the power to overrule democratically elected lawmakers and the will of the people.

As Cooper says, Biden should tell the Supremes to go pound sand and then “raise holy hell in speeches and the press to make clear the grotesque irresponsibility of what is happening”:

Here’s an institution trying to cause a completely pointless national default, destroying untold jobs, businesses, and the credit rating of the country, whose elite members are all unelected, where five members of the majority were appointed by a president who took office after losing the popular vote, and one of whom occupies a blatantly stolen seat. Here’s an institution that has struck down anti-corruption laws by the bushel and is openly rolling in oligarch graft like Scrooge McDuck, while declaring itself to be immune from oversight. All that would add to the political pressure on the justices.

If Biden can’t do well for the American people they they will not turn out in the massive majorities that Democrats need to get minimal majorities. If Biden can’t do well for the American people, then Biden — who would lose an election to either Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump if it were called today — will turn America’s predators loose on its people for at least four more years:

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/2024-presidential-election-2016-donald-trump-joe-biden/

And let’s face it, it’ll be Trump. DeSantis is dead in the water. The GOP is the party of out-of-control, swivel-eyed loons who’ve been whipped into a terrorized frenzy by an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire and his freak henchmen, like the taint-tanning frozen food failson. They aren’t going to elect “smart Trump.” They like “stupid Trump” (AKA “Trump”) too much.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Hay-on-Wye, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/26/mint-the-coin-etc-etc/#blitz-em

[Image ID: 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

Hikaru no Go

The first sports manga I read and the gold standard for Shounen Jump sports manga. The slow maturation of Obata's art with Hikaru's character arc compliment each other so perfectly (when he does his own writing I don't have time for Obata), the triangle of skill/interest/desire in Hikaru's relationship with the game, JUST PUTTING A GHOST IN YOUR SPORT SERIES AS A MENTOR TO THE PROTAGONIST -- the natural end of the series is perfect (and not undone by continuing for several more volumes) and I still think about it twenty years later and get teary. Any subject can be engaging in the right hands.

Tokyo Babylon

My age and gender mean not including a CLAMP title would be a lie. It would be like a dude my age denying having seen any Dragon Ball. Tokyo Babylon is my go-to, with the heavy contrast of the art, chunkier and less streamlined than CLAMP's later titles, and the themes of death, environmentalism, and the disconnect between people and the world around them in post-Bubble Tokyo, are things I keep coming back to in contemporary series, and looking back is both nostalgic while showing me how things have improved in terms of what's accessible and considered marketable in North America. There was a time when the idea of Tokyo Babylon being licensed was laughable! And now it's been licensed, published, and had the license lapse MULTIPLE TIMES.

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

You should read Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Ask me about Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. It's a kind, primarily episodic horror manga with strong anthropological roots. It's supernatural and incredibly real, with stories dealing with xenophobia, the criminal justice system, homelessness, environmental destruction, war crimes, aging populations and the lack of support, isolation, idol culture, otaku culture, employability after receiving a liberal arts education, urban legends, aliens, the dangers of technological innovation, parental loss, revenge, abortion, infanticide, juvenile offenders, cloning, blackmarket animal imports, the continued military presence in Japan, cryonics, the postal service, immigration, what if Jack the Ripper was a ghost and he possessed a cool thing you had imported and continued his serial killings as a ghost. You should read Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Ask me about Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

From Eroica With Love

This series started with superpowered teens, including one named LEOPARD SOLID, and Aoike decided that was boring and she made it a series about a British aristocrat with a secret identity as a flamboyant gentleman thief with amazing hair and a sexually charged rivalry with a German intelligence agent who hates him. It's amazing. It needs to be rescued. There's something like 40 volumes. The pope gets stolen. There's a car chase with a tank and a bazooka on the autobahn. It's perfect and outrageous and over-the-top.

X-Day

I love Mizushiro and she's been tragically unrepresented in English licenses (X-Day is an ex-Tokyopop license, for a one-two punch of tragedy). X-Day is about lonely young people connecting on the internet and planning to blow up their school. There was a panel that felt like my depression had been put perfectly, beautifully, heartbreakingly onto the page.

Pluto

Urasawa's one of the greats and Pluto sees him adapting another of the greats into a smart, often sad, science fiction mystery thriller, and I still haven't been able to bring myself to read it a second time, despite it being Urasawa's shortest series.

Goodnight Punpun

Have you ever read something so profoundly raw and honest and recognizable that you had to quit reading it cold turkey? I think about Goodnight Punpun a lot and I stare at it on my shelf and I know I'm still not ready to read the rest of it.

Otherworld Barbara

No one draws the way Hagio does, with lines that look like they will dissolve if you touch them, and she understands that soft, dreamy beauty should be able to encompass things that are hard and violent and bloody because girls love romance and dream realms and clones and question of identity and beautifully androgynous characters with dark starry eyes and cannibalism.

Banana Fish

I have often gone on, at length, about one of the core components of shoujo, especially classic shoujo, being BIG FEELINGS, and the hugeness of the feelings make the events correspondingly BIG AND POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT but Banana Fish ties that with extreme violence and a plot that becomes increasingly Metal Gear Solid, with impossible drugs and mind control and knife fights and snipers and torture hospitals and the American military industrial complex. And then it comes back to feelings. It's another title where you really see the art evolve, which I love, and it's one of those perfect tragedies, where you can feel bad things coming, sometimes see them coming, but there's a rightness in the tragic ending. It hits the catharsis necessary in real, proper tragedies.

Berserk