It was never up to President Joe Biden to forgive the student loan debt held by millions of Americans, yet during the midterms, the Democrats made it a party-wide campaign promise. While the lie didn’t fly well enough to stop the Republicans from taking back the House with an unforgivably slim margin, it sure gave young leftists something to rally around.
But despite Biden telling Americans he’d forgive the debt, even members of his own party were feeling uneasy about the promise. New Hampshire Democrat lawmaker Chris Pappas didn’t like the way Biden was sidestepping Congress and said publicly that this wasn’t so much forgiveness as it was debt reallocation. Former Treasury Secretary and National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers warned that this was all “spending that raises demand and increases inflation.”
“It consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college, said Summers. “It will also tend to be inflationary by raising tuitions.”
Still, that didn’t stop many more Democrats from cheering on Biden’s false promise. Interestingly enough, the ones cheering the hardest were the ones with the most debt.
The push to put the burden of student loans on the taxpayer made it all the way to the Supreme Court after Republicans blocked it at every turn, including Biden vs. Nebraska as previously reported by RedState:
The case is Biden vs. Nebraska, which deals with a student loan forgiveness plan that Joe Biden made up out of thin air. On August 24, 2022, two and a half years after a COVID public health emergency was declared by President Trump, Biden announced that he was canceling $10,000 in federal student loan debt for most borrowers and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
According to AP, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh are bringing it back to Biden’s attempt to bypass Congress, an act they find “problematic”:
Roberts pointed to the wide impact and expense of the program, three times saying it would cost “a half-trillion dollars.” The program is estimated to cost $400 billion over 30 years.
“If you’re talking about this in the abstract, I think most casual observers would say if you’re going to give up that much … money. If you’re going to affect the obligations of that many Americans on a subject that’s of great controversy, they would think that’s something for Congress to act on,” Roberts said.
Kavanaugh suggested that the administration was using an “old law” to unilaterally implement a debt relief program that Congress had rejected. He said the situation was familiar: “in the wake of Congress not authorizing the action, the executive nonetheless doing a massive new program.”
That, he said, “seems problematic.”
Additionally, Kavanaugh didn’t like that Biden was using the national emergency powers created by the pandemic to push this debt relief. In what seems to be Kavanaugh slamming a nail into this coffin he noted that the “finest moments in the court’s history” have been “pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power.”
According to Biden, the 2003 HEROES Act gives the Secretary of Education a way to waive federal student loan debt when paired with a national emergency. This was meant to help our troops from accruing more debt while they fought overseas. The Biden administration is attempting to bend the purpose of this act to send the debt to the American taxpayer for a boost in approval.
But all of the illegality and legal jujitsu aside, the fact remains that people accepted this debt on themselves and as such, they should pay it. While education is a blessing, it’s not a right. Demanding that others pay for your decisions is not how America works.