The Debt Ceiling v. the Fourteenth Amendment

For months, the words “debt ceiling” have been hanging over Americans’ heads, along with apocalyptic predictions of what might happen if President Obama and Congress don’t raise the ceiling or rearrange the budget before August.
But back in April, Garrett Epps proposed something completely novel, that’s just now starting to get a lot of attention: what if the president simply asserted that under the Fourteenth Amendment the debt ceiling is unconstitutional? Epps is a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a columnist for The Atlantic. His 2006 book, “Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America,” is considered the most comprehensive history of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment.