With the Supreme Court blowing up key pillars of the Democratic Party agenda, President Biden and other party leaders are doubling down and blaming Donald Trump and Republicans for the recent high court rulings.
Defeated Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ayanna Pressley are vowing to plow ahead with debt relief despite the fact the law of the land is now against it.
“I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution,” Biden said after the ruling on student loans Friday.
Biden’s student loan forgiveness program was always sketchy and it was not a surprise the conservative high court ruled the president didn’t have the authority to implement it.
Biden, running as a moderate during the 2020 campaign, himself even questioned whether he had the power to invalidate thousands of loans. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the same thing.
Now it turns out they were right.
Yet Democrats are hoping to turn the Supreme Court setback into a plus somehow. Warren and Pressley went on a “student debt cancellation tour” last year to tout their signature plan which they took credit for.
A few years ago Pressley was sitting on the lightweight Boston City Council, now she’s taking on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Still other Democrats are calling on Biden to pack the court with more liberal justices to get around the recent rulings, which also struck against LGBTQ rights and abortion rights.
It’s a questionable political strategy given the fact that Americans are hardly united behind student loan forgiveness and other issues like affirmative action.
Polls show voters are in fact divided over loan cancellations — with most people who don’t have loan debt strongly opposed. The debt forgiveness program appealed only to the Democratic Party left-leaning base but it was not a winner among average Americans.
They don’t like their taxes paying for other people’s debt. What about the people who worked hard to pay off their debt? They don’t get their money back.
That means that half of American voters are going to give credit to Trump for appointing more conservative justices who authored the rulings.
But no one’s talking about the costs of higher education that are contributing to the problem. That’s the real issue.
Warren got paid $420K to teach a few classes at Harvard, while University of Massachusetts administrators get paid obscene salaries — all despite declining enrollments and rising tuition at most colleges.
No, Warren would rather talk about Republicans robbing her of her debt cancellation plan — and urge Biden to move forward.
Pressley also asserted that Biden should immediately cancel debt for the more than 25 million people who had already applied under the now illegal program.
That only means more lawsuits and challenges ahead, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.