Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

Seems like the treasury can mint coins whenever it wants? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111 …

"As needed to meet the needs of the united states" isn't the same as "whenever it wants". It means at the discretion of congress, to fund itself, or to replace coins taken out of circulation. If you look at section 5112 there's a special provision for commemorative coins

You can also reverse this logic -- if they could just mint any coins whenever they want they wouldn't have looked at using the trillion dollar commemorative coin loophole to work around the debt ceiling

well, it's "in amounts the secretary decides are necessary" I read 5112, it doesn't seem like (k) provides additional discretion over the general one given by 5111 (a)?

my impression was that it would just cost too much to do this with "normal coins"

but icbw, i'm not a lawyer, could be that the practical effect is that 5111(a) means "congress needs to authorize it" but 5112(k) bypasses it

That all depends on if you think a judge will side with you on whether your decision actually fits "to meet the needs of the united states"

yeah fair. what my reading of that was that 5111(a) applies to everything in 5112, so the needs thing also applies to 5112(k)