One of the many ways that the U.S. is not like a person is that the U.S., like any government with its own currency, can always just print money to pay its bills. After all, why borrow when you can just generate it out of thin air? Obviously, Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe might have an answer to that, but in our case, macroeconomists I trust (such as Paul Krugman) are pretty sure that printing money in our current economy won't lead to hyperinflation. This is particularly true if we destroy all of the extra money once the debt ceiling is raised.
However, there are limits on the government's ability to print or mint money. This limits are in part legal limits and in part practical limits.
Printing pallets of $100 bills doesn't work, for two reasons. First, Federal Reserve Notes are effectively promissory notes issued by the Fed in exchange for loaned funds. (The Fed actually has to have real collateral—usually Treasury bonds—to back up every note in circulation.) So, even if the Fed could just print $1T in currency, the U.S. Treasury would have to purchase them with a trillion dollars of cash on hand. And if the US had $1T in cash on hand, there wouldn't be a debt ceiling problem. The second problem is that Federal Reserve Notes are actually considered debt instruments. Federal Reserve Notes are "obligations of the United States," and they thus count against the debt ceiling's limitation on "obligations whose principal and interest are guaranteed by the United States Government." So, even if the Fed gave away $100 bills to the US Treasury for free, it would actually be putting more U.S. debt out into the world, which is not allowed.
Minting coins is also problematic. Federal law is very specific about what denominations of coins can be minted in each type of metal. And this creates limits on the seigniorage that the government can make on coins. For example, because copper and zinc are so expensive, to mint $1 trillion in pennies, the US would have to buy about $2 trillion in copper and zinc. (The law requires that pennies be made of copper and zinc.) And, again, if the US had $2 trillion in cash on hand right now, then we wouldn't have a debt ceiling problem. Currently, the law does not allow for any denominations where the US could actually afford the metal it takes to mint the coins.
With one exception. The subsection on platinum coins says that the Secretary of the Treasury may mint platinum coins with "such specifications, ... quantities, [and] denominations ... as the Secretary, in the Secretary's discretion, may prescribe." The purpose of this provision was to make commemorative coins, but nothing in the law says that. And given the textualist bent of the Federal Courts in the modern era, a court would probably find that there are no limits on the permitted denominations of platinum coins. So, the Secretary can just buy 1 oz. worth of platinum, stamp "$1 trillion" on it, and instantly will $1 trillion into existence. It can then deposit them in the federal government's account at the federal reserve, and then write checks on that account. (Full disclosure: I've always had problems with strict textualism, precisely because of absurdities like this one. If I was a judge, I would probably have some reservations about this interpretation.)
There's actually an interesting constitutional question about this. There's this principle in constitutional law called the "non-delegation" doctrine. Congress can't give unlimited power to the President by passing law that effectively says, "The president can do whatever he wants." This doctrine was one of the many ways that the Supreme Court struck down New Deal programs in the 1930s.
Since the New Deal, however, this doctrine has never been invoked. The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can delegate most law-making to the executive branch, as long as there's some intelligible principle, policy goal, or guideline behind a law. So, a ruling striking down the platinum coin law on non-delegation grounds is highly unlikely. On the other hand, saying to the Treasury Secretary, "Mint as much money as you want," is a pretty extreme delegation of power. The Constitution gives Congress the power to mint coins, and it's not clear that Congress can let the Treasury Secretary do whatever he wants.
However, this is all probably an academic point, because nobody can challenge the president if he mints the Coin. To have standing to challenge a government action, you must have suffered an individualized injury. In general, taxpayers do not have standing to challenge general fiscal laws that do not target a specific group. That, in theory, are what elections are for. Members of Congress, in order to sue, need to be "injured" like any other Plaintiff. The Supreme Court generally doesn't like wading into political battles, so when a member of Congress sues the president, it uses an "especially rigorous" inquiry that effectively asks whether the President has effectively "nullified" an Act of Congress. If the treasury mints a platinum coin, no laws have been broken or ignored. So, if the president does instruct the Treasury Secretary to mint a platinum coin, it may be "by definition" legal, in the realist sense that nobody has legal standing to challenge it.
UPDATE: Matt Yglesias gives this fitting eulogy to #MintTheCoin:
I'm glad we had this conversation. Direct discussion of the platinum coin was a good reminder that many people, including influential media figures, appear to have no idea what money is or how the monetary system works. Apart from the shockingly widespread view that the value of coins is determined by their metallic content, there was a lot of insistence that creating money was somehow an act of "magic." In fact, the way all legal currency is created is that a government agency creates the money. ... When the Fed does the thing that reporters call "lower[ing] interest rates" they buy bonds on the open market in exchange for money. Where do they get the money? From nowhere. They just make it. That's money. Whether the electronic process of attributing more or less money to an account is accompanied by a little piece of platinum or not is wholly irrelevant.
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