(I originally posted this yesterday at Google +)

Here’s a novel approach to the debt ceiling dilemma: raise it unilaterally. How? Not based on some strained 14th Amendment reading, but based on the argument that the “necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed” demand it.

It was a good enough argument for FDR and Lincoln. When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War “he said that it was necessary to violate one law, lest all the laws but one fall into ruin.” Similarly, FDR said in his first inaugural address that he hoped to work with all legislative authority, ‘ “But it may be,” he continued, “that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.” ‘

This isn’t my idea; rather, it’s from an Op-Ed at the NYT written by Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, a couple of law professors.

It would make for a hell of a summer watching this wind through the courts.