FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jeff Hauser, [email protected]
All last spring, as the looming threat of default swallowed up all the oxygen on the Hill, every other serious crisis demanding political attention played second fiddle to Republicans’ manufactured disaster. In May, President Biden said his “hope and intention” was to “find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it.” A lawsuit brought this May by 75,000 federal employees challenging the constitutionality of the debt limit offers just that opportunity.
So why is the Justice Department actively fighting to get the case dismissed, likely limiting the federal government’s capacity to govern effectively?
Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser said: “The Justice Department’s notion that the federal employees’ claims of injury are ‘wholly speculative, as they depend on a future chain of events that may never occur,’ is absurd: the crisis is scheduled to recur precisely on January 1, 2025, as it has recurred repeatedly this century. In the meantime, uncertainty continues to trouble hundreds of thousands of federal workers, who have no guarantee of how their jobs, salaries, and pensions will be affected. Indeed, the stance that Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is advancing creates an unfortunately sound case against workers considering taking a job in what has become an unstable federal government.”
“After calling for just such a case to be brought, the Biden administration now fights it, demonstrating a truly remarkable willingness to shoot itself in the foot. The administration has every authority to take a different tack in this lawsuit and make space for the constitutionality of the debt limit to be worked out in the famously slow moving US legal system before the clock runs out on preventing the next crisis. Why is the Biden administration trying to rob itself of a clear opportunity to protect American workers and the economy from being roiled by MAGA saboteurs?”
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Image: this Official White House Photo of President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland by Hannah Foslien is in the public domain.
