Harvard's Lawrence Tribe, professor of Constitutional law, has a change of heart about utilizing the 14th Amendment to override Kevin McCarthy's threat to the national debt ceiling. He writes in this morning's New York Times:

I still worry about those questions. But I’ve come to believe that they are the wrong ones for us to be asking. While teaching constitutional law, I often explored the problem of bloated presidential power, the puzzle of preserving the rule of law in the face of unprecedented pressures, and the paradox of having to choose among a set of indisputably bad options. During my last semester teaching, with Covid forcing my seminars from the classroom to the video screen, I studied the most insightful literature on the debt ceiling and concluded that we need to reframe the argument.

The question isn’t whether the president can tear up the debt limit statute to ensure that the Treasury Department can continue paying bills submitted by veterans’ hospitals or military contractors or even pension funds that purchased government bonds.

The question isn’t whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress.

The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.

There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.

He goes on to say that the only person with the power to say no on the debt ceiling is the president.

As a practical matter, what that means is this: Mr. Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms — and as soon as possible, before it’s too late to avert a financial crisis — that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the Treasury Department must borrow more than Congress has said it can.

The president should remind Congress and the nation, “I’m bound by my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts for the first time in our entire history.” Above all, the president should say with clarity, “My duty faithfully to execute the laws extends to all the spending laws Congress has enacted, laws that bind whoever sits in this office — laws that Congress enacted without worrying about the statute capping the amount we can borrow.”

By taking that position, the president would not be usurping Congress’s lawmaking power or its power of the purse. Nor would he be usurping the Supreme Court’s power to “say what the law is,” as Chief Justice John Marshall once put it. Mr. Biden would simply be doing his duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” even if doing so leaves one law — the borrowing limit first enacted in 1917 — temporarily on the cutting room floor.

Tribe says for a president to pick the lesser of two evils when no other option exists "is the essence of constitutional leadership, not the action of a tyrant. And there is no doubt that ignoring the debt ceiling until Congress either raises or abolishes it is a lesser evil than leaving those with lawful claims against the Treasury out in the cold."

As he points out, Section 4 prohibits the president from permanently stiffing our creditors — even those required to wait their turn after the Treasury runs dry.

So even if Speaker Kevin McCarthy and those pulling his strings succeed in making some of those creditors wait, it wouldn’t eliminate our debts; it would merely replace them with I.O.U.s. And that’s just debt in another form.

All Congress would have done is create economic catastrophe on top of constitutional crisis — and without securing compliance with the debt ceiling that Republican claim to want. The only way out of this forest is through the trees.