Once again, the Supreme Court has slapped President Biden's hand after his latest attempt to circumvent the Constitution and forgive tens of billions of dollars in student loan debt was blocked.
“We won’t stop fighting against Republican elected officials’ efforts to raise costs on millions of their own constituents’ student loan payments,” White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said.
What began as a successful vote-buying scheme in 2022 has morphed into a "student debt strike" as more than half of student loan borrowers have stopped paying back what they owe. Biden's defiance of the law has created a crisis.
The Saving on a Valuable Education program (SAVE) was challenged by 11 Republican states when it was initiated in June 2023. The program runs afoul of the Constitution by utilizing forgiveness instead of repayment. Biden has been looking for a constitutional workaround for two years without success. Each program he's initiated to forgive student loan debt has been shot down by the Supreme Court.
The Biden administration tried an end-around based on the court's last ruling that his plans were unconstitutional. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the new plan “relies on a different statute with different language to provide a different set of borrowers with different assistance from the one-time loan forgiveness the court held invalid.”
The old plan invoked the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, often called the HEROES Act. That law gave the secretary of education the power to waive rules to protect borrowers affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
In its decision in June last year, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the 2003 law did not authorize forgiving the loans at issue. That same day, Mr. Biden vowed to find other ways to provide debt relief.
“Today’s decision has closed one path,” Mr. Biden said then. “Now we’re going to pursue another.”
Biden had already stopped repayment of student loans for those in the SAVE program as the legal issues worked their way through the courts. Will those borrowers ever restart paying their loans back?
Biden's continual defiance of the Supreme Court has resulted in millions of borrowers refusing to repay loans. Many never restarted their repayment after the "moratoriums" during the pandemic. There's even an organization that's been formed to urge borrowers not to repay what they owe.
The Debt Collective claims that because Biden "promised" to cancel the debt, they don't owe anything.
“I refuse to pay a debt the president promised to cancel,” it says on the group’s website, adding that “Until the president uses his executive authority to cancel debt, I am going on debt strike.” They contend that “the government doesn’t need our money and can easily cancel the debt.”
Ah, the utter stupidity of Gen Z.
An editorial from last August in the New York Sun explains.
This overlooks the estimated $475 billion price tag of Mr. Biden’s debt forgiveness. That expense would be borne by all taxpayers to subsidize the debts freely incurred by the minority of Americans who pursue higher education. The confusion sown by Mr. Biden is noted by Vox, which observes the White House is “urging people to start paying their loans this fall” while “simultaneously telling millions of borrowers their loans will be entirely forgiven.”
It's clear that Biden and the Democrats aren't interested in obeying the Constitution. They are interested in finding ways around it. And they are going to keep trying to forgive student loan debt whether it's constitutional or not.
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