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The
Columbus Dispatch
Portman
resists debt-ceiling proposal
By
Jessica Wehrman
Thursday December 6, 2012
WASHINGTON
— Sen. Rob Portman urges President
Barack Obama to lay off a White House plan to change the procedure that
the federal
government uses to raise the debt ceiling.
Portman’s
letter came after the U.S. Department
of Treasury released a blog suggesting changing the current process —
which
requires Congress to vote to raise the debt ceiling — with a process in
which
Congress gains the right to formally “disapprove” of debt-ceiling
increases but
the president has the power to veto that bill and thus extend the
government’s
borrowing capacity.
Portman,
a former Office of Management and
Budget director, circulated a letter protesting that idea among his
Capitol
Hill Republican colleagues yesterday and planned to send it out at the
end of
the day.
The
Ohio Republican wrote that he believed
“that Congress’s power over borrowing, like the power of the purse, is
firmly
rooted in our constitutional tradition.”
“The
Founders understood the potential danger
of permitting the Executive to unilaterally incur new public debt,”
Portman
wrote. “Consequently, Article I of the Constitution empowers only
Congress ‘to
borrow money on the credit of the United States.’ The debt ceiling is
the means
by which Congress exercises this inherent legislative responsibility.”
Portman
pointed out that Obama, as a U.S.
senator in 2006, voted against raising the debt ceiling…
Read
the rest of the article at The Columbus
Dispatch
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