Joe Biden is a lawless president. He’d be right at home in a western, hiding out with the Hole-in-the-Wall gang or mumbling about stinking badges.
Biden is trying again, for the third time, to declare that federal student loan debt is forgiven.
“The plan could help rally support among young voters,” the New York Times reported.
Giving money in exchange for votes is not legal, nor is forgiving federal student loan debt without congressional authorization. But in 2020, Biden campaigned for the presidency promising he would do it anyway.
Anyone who has ever taken a high school government class knows that spending bills must begin in the House of Representatives, then pass the Senate and be signed by the president. This is how spending your tax money is allowed.
Federal student loan forgiveness is a spending program. It spends money owed to taxpayers and credits it to people who took out loans for their education. Until Joe Biden became president, Democrats and Republicans agreed that the president did not have unilateral authority to cancel federal student loan debt.
The U.S. Supreme Court explained this to the president last year, rejecting the plan Biden developed in the summer of 2022, in time to buy votes in the midterm elections.
This plan would have canceled a staggering $400 billion in student debt by twisting the HEROES Act, a law that allowed the government to cancel student debt during a national emergency. The HEROES Act was passed to help people who were joining the military after the September 11 attacks.
Biden attempted to apply it to more than 40 million borrowers by arguing that COVID remained a national emergency. The plan was challenged, and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Biden had exceeded his authority.
Did this stop the Bumbledance Kid or his friends at the Hole-in-the-Wall hideout? Of course not. What kind of movie would it be?
“I will stop at nothing,” the president said in a statement after the Supreme Court overturned his plan.
This is a better film. Terrible government, but a better movie.
In the next scene, Biden expanded a loan repayment program created by Congress in the 1990s. The program allowed income-based loan payments and forgave loans after 20 or 25 years. Biden changed it to 10 years. That affected about 150,000 voters — sorry, student borrowers — who had loans of $12,000 or less.
Clearly, that wasn’t enough to win over the West, because in February, Biden announced at a local campaign stop in Culver City that he was accelerating loan forgiveness by six months. And in early April, the president announced a much broader student loan forgiveness program while campaigning in the state of Wisconsin, where a mid-March Emerson College poll showed him four points behind of former President Donald Trump.
Biden said the new plan would “relieve student debt for more than 30 million Americans.” Ten million voters – sorry, borrowers – would benefit from debt forgiveness of $5,000 or more. Four million people would see their debt completely erased.
All thanks to you, the taxpayer, who is filing your Form 1040 as we speak.
They rob you like a stagecoach.
Back at the Hole-in-the-Wall hideout, the Biden gang explained to reporters that this plan is carefully designed to circumvent the Supreme Court’s objections to the latest plan. But already 18 states have formed a group and sued to block it.
It won’t be canceled until long after the November election, so the 30 million borrowers who believe they’ll get free money can keep believing until the polls.
Biden’s anarchy doesn’t stop at student debt. He is using the Environmental Protection Agency to finalize economically harmful rules, such as emissions standards that are actually mandates for electric vehicles, in open defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the West Virginia case vs. EPA. In this case, the court held that agencies cannot decide major questions of national public policy in excess of the authority that Congress has granted them.
Another law that has been riddled with holes by the Biden gang is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It allows the government to grant ineligible people “conditional release to temporarily enter the United States,” but “only on a case-by-case basis, for urgent humanitarian reasons or for an important public interest”. Biden used this “case-by-case” authorization to allow 30,000 migrants per month to fly to U.S. cities and stay there for two years. The rest of the country’s border security is so broken that the House just voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Then there is the lawlessness within the Biden Justice Department, which enforces the law, which last week was too much even for a Biden-appointed judge.
“Are you kidding me?” asked U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes. She chastised Justice Department lawyers who asked two attorneys in the DOJ’s tax division not to comply with subpoenas from a congressional committee investigating whether Hunter Biden was receiving treatment special. “There’s a person in jail right now because you all filed a criminal case against him because he didn’t show up for a subpoena. And now you’re ignoring these subpoenas?
Judge Reyes was referring to former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who failed to comply with a Jan. 6 committee subpoena out of concern that testifying would violate executive privilege and the separation of powers. He was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to prison although his appeal is still pending.
“I think it’s very rewarding that you’re doing criminal investigations and you’re putting people in jail for not showing up,” Judge Reyes told Justice Department lawyers.
This is how these films usually end, when the law catches up with the outlaws. Grab some popcorn, the Mayorkas impeachment trial is about to begin.
Email Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley