Should the President sit idly by and watch the Congress default on our debt??
(pnwmom had this link in an earlier post)
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/10/02/can-obama-ignore-the-debt-ceiling/emergency-powers-let-the-president-borrow-beyond-the-debt-limit
<snip>
Hamilton, like Locke and others before him, believed that ultimately the executive in a liberal constitutional system must have a power — sometimes, called the “prerogative” — to act unilaterally to address serious unanticipated threats to public well-being.
Thomas Jefferson, normally Hamilton’s antagonist, agreed with Hamilton that the executive must sometimes take actions that are not authorized by the Constitution. In a famous letter, Jefferson posed a hypothetical where gridlock in Congress blocked the country from acquiring needed territory: “Ought the Executive, in that case, and with that foreknowledge, to have secured the good to his country, and to have trusted to their justice for the transgression of the law? I think he ought, and that the act would have been approved.” Jefferson would have the executive act extra-legally rather than based on an expansive Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution, and then seek vindication from the public. Such thinking justified in Jefferson’s mind his purchase of the territory of Louisiana from France despite his view that he lacked the constitutional authority to do so.
Whichever view you accept, it provides a basis for President Obama to raise the debt ceiling on his own if he believes with good reason that the failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to default on U.S. debt, and that this in turn would lead to the collapse of the financial system and economic depression. Default is not a legitimate policy choice; no one favors it. It would result from a failure of our institutions, not from a compromise among contending political groups, and the president’s intervention would surely be ratified by the public and even by Congress.
The contrary view — that the president must sit helplessly as the economy collapses, fettered by a reading of an 18th-century document that not even the founders would have believed appropriate — reflects a legalistic mentality that none of our great presidents has possessed or acted on.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I have been very politically active since my first presidential election, in 1972, when I was a precinct delegate for McGovern. Since then, I have done a lot -- less recently, age has its challenges.
But I have never seen anything like what is going on here. We saw rather alarming glimmerings of this in the latter part of the 80's in Kansas. I served there as a county party officer and state delegate. We had a wonderful organization with a permanent headquarters and a salaried executive director, even during non-election years. I applied for the ED position, but the party opted for the best person. 
alas, I settled for party treasurer, an elected, but volunteer position.
We did good. KS governors were almost wholly Democrats back then. The last was Kathleen Sibelius. But we saw bad things happening in the Republican Party. We had evidence of theocratic undercurrents. The GOP monthly newsletter spoke more of Jesus than candidates. It alarmed us.
Nobody listened.
And here we are.
