Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

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)

I think the best way to make the point is to reverse the reasoning here again. If that were true they would just use bills

bills are not done by the mint, they're done by a different part of the treasury, and as I understand it that's a service they provide for the Fed (so this needs congressional approval since it improves debt)