It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
I realize that this isn’t a serious discussion, but the NRCC’s tweet presumably draws upon Kevin Drum’s observation in Mother Jones that the text of the law actually only permits the Treasury to issue a platinum “bullion coin” and thus does appear to contemplate that the coin comprise its face value in precious metal.
Maybe the OP can explain why Drum is so evidently wrong?
Kevin Drum is not a lawyer, and his other arguments why the coin is illegal have already been shot down. So I’m not taking the need to rebut him on this one too seriously. (I hate to dump on Kevin; he’s one of my favorite bloggers, but he’s been really wrong on this one.)
The one thing I will point out is that the relationship between our coinage and the value of the metal contained in it has long since been severed. Oldies like me remember when dimes and quarters used to be silver; that ended in the mid-1960s.
Nitpick: 1981 pennies have more than two cents’ worth of copper. [del]In fact, am I wrong that today’s pennies have more than 1 cent’s worth of zinc?[/del]
Disclaimer: Melting down a U.S. coin is probably a federal crime.
ETA: Yeah, way wrong. Can’t you even use Google, septi-poo?
… OK, I’m in, sounds like a solid plan. When do we start ? I got 50 eurobucks right here.
And the Stupid Democrat quote was from close to three years ago, for fuck’s sake. If you’re going to go full tu quoque, is it too much to ask to find someone more recent, and maybe, just maybe, someone talking about the same topic?
I know I’ve often said that liberals were loony, but this isn’t quite what I had in mind.
Johnson was the Regional Whip for the Eighth Region. How is that a “backbencher?”
The same section of law discusses other bullion coins whose denominations pretty clearly don’t have anything to do with the amount (the “one dollar” first lady commemerative coins, for example, have several hundred dollars worth of gold in them). So “bullion coin” in the act clearly doesn’t mean what Drum thinks it means
Plus the original intent of the act was apparently to raise money through seigniorage, which doesn’t make any sense if the coin is limited in value to the cost of its precious metals.
Isn’t this coin going to be denominated in Ameros? Might as well go full teabag with this thing.
What if we get them a Hawaiian birth certificate?
There are currently 200 Democrats in the House. According to the most recent leadership information I can find, as many as 112 Democrats can be some kind of “whip”. Regional whips are the lowest level, and each of the 12 regions have two whips. So Johnson was one of two whips for his region, the lowest level of whip in a structure where the majority of Democrats could conceivably be some kind of “whip”. Yep, he’s a major player all right.
So, the stupid idea here is to mint the trillion dollar coin out of $1 trillion in platinum (and put Obama’s face on it while sinking the Titanic), but not the coin itself? That’s the good part of the idea? 
Maybe Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe can:
At least we can all agree that this idea is so gloriously absurd that it simply *has *to happen, right?
Well, one might be tempted to classify him as a “backbencher” if one’s first thought upon reading your post was “WTF is a Regional Whip?”
Sounds like a minor functionary in the [del]Knights of Columbus[/del] Kiwanis Club (in the KofC he’d probably be called Bearer of the Minor Plenary Seal, or something similarly quasi-feudal).
Yes, the idea of a trillion-dollar coin is absurd. On the other hand, we were already through the looking glass when raising the debt ceiling wasn’t treated as a mere formality as it has for decades.
The stupid part of the idea is the suggestion that the government would need $1 trillion worth of platinum in order to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin.
The coin itself is the good part of the idea, yes. If a calamity is approaching, and you can prevent the calamity from happening by doing something that would in any other context be totally ridiculous and silly, it becomes a hell of a lot less ridiculous and silly if it would in fact avert the calamity.
Since Tom Tildrum brought Kevin Drum’s name into it, let me comment on the one genuinely disturbing (to me, at least) thing Kevin says:
I’ll disregard the “not by pretending the law allows the president to do anything he wants” part, because I believe the law allows the President to do what the law says the President can do, not “anything he wants” in which case I’d be advocating that Obama mint a few $1 trillion coins, and use the money to build high-speed rail from coast to coast.
What’s offensive and disturbing is Kevin’s apparent belief that the best way to deal with the GOP’s willingness “to set the country on fire to please their increasingly fever-swampish base” is to let them do it, then kick their butts at the polls in 2014.
No: the renewed recession (which is the best-case scenario for the failure to raise the ceiling) would damage the lives of millions of people whose situations are still fragile from the last recession and the still-substantial unavailability of jobs. We libruls don’t want to benefit from a catastrophe by having a great 2014 at the polls; we want to keep the catastrophe from happening.
There are exceptions, I’m sure, but to the vast majority of us lefties, the notion that
**(calamity + electoral gains) > (no calamity + no electoral gains) **
is morally abhorrent.
This. It’s the least bad of a slew of bad options available to the President.
And, it has the advantage of practically forcing the Beltway media, self-trapped in their false-equivalence bubble, to explain why the President is doing it. If there is no semi-plausible cover story left for the tantrum-throwers afterward, then maybe, just maybe, there will be no repeat of it.