March 15 will be an important day.

[Bob Butler 54]

(03-30-2017, 10:15 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I would consider CNN to be a partisan news source.

A quite reasonable assertion.  Most big news organizations are located in major urban areas.  They are not immune to the local culture, and lean blue even without deliberate corporate decisions to tell people what they want to hear.  As I said, I try to take news from any source with a grain of salt.

But red and blue perceptions are so skewed that I doubt there would be a general consensus on any news organization being, um, fair and balanced.  Would you and Eric care to get together to try to find a truly neutral news source?

(03-30-2017, 10:15 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: And of course all of this assumes that the President doesn't invoke EO 11110.  Government shut downs happen not because the government is out of money but because the treasury cannot issue more debt instruments (mostly only of interest to investors or the Fed).  But if the Treasury has power to issue debt, it also has power to issue non-debt.  US notes wouldn't be counted toward the debt ceiling and the legislation is already in place having been put in there by another controversial Republican President.

Good luck with that.  I visited Wiki's entry on EO 11110, and found among other things...

Quote:Revocation

The text that had been added to E.O. 10289 by E.O. 11110 remained on the books until President Ronald Reagan issued Executive Order 12608 on September 9, 1987 as part of a general clean-up of executive orders. Executive Order 12608 revoked subparagraph (j) of paragraph 1 of Executive Order 10289, as amended by Executive Order 11110.[15] Thus, E.O. 12608 specifically revoked the relevant portion of E.O. 10289 that had been added by E.O. 11110. This action effectively revoked E.O. 11110. By this time, however, the remaining legislative authority behind E.O. 11110 had been repealed by Congress when Pub.L. 97–258 was passed in 1982.

In March 1964, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon halted redemption of silver certificates for silver dollars. In the 1970s, large numbers of the remaining silver dollars in the mint vaults were sold to the collecting public for collector value. All redemption in silver ceased on June 24, 1968.

I didn't chase down all the details, but JFK signed EO 11110 at a time when US currency was backed with metals.  The major problem it tried to address was the government's hoarding of silver to back currency at a time when industry needed more and more silver for technical use.  It is hardly surprising, given that we're currently working a floating currency, that the authority to issue metal based currency is long gone.

Now if one hops around highly political web sites, you will eventually find one that tells you what you want to hear.  For me, the smaller and more partisan the web sight, the more dubious I get.  Just out of curiosity, what was your source on EO 11110?

I've heard other methods by which the executive branch might usurp Congress's power of the purse.   I've been taking them about as seriously as I take UFOs and the Loch Ness monster.  My gut feeling is that they should all be unconstitutional.  You shouldn't be able to usurp the power of the purse using executive orders.  The way the Supreme Court works these days, who really knows?

Anyway, I'll start taking such schemes seriously when they start being reported from a variety of sources with divergent perspectives and agendas.