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President Biden continues to try buying the youth vote with his unilateral cancellation of higher education student debt on a large scale. The fact that the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s earlier humongous debt cancellation program as unconstitutional because it exceeded his executive authority has not fazed this president for a moment.
“The Supreme Court blocked it. They blocked it,” President Biden said. “But that didn’t stop me.”
These are the words of a president acting like an autocrat who is willing to tear the Constitution’s separation of powers protections to shreds.
Fortunately, the attorneys general of several states have filed a complaint in federal court challenging President Biden’s latest overreach.
“Yet again, the President is unilaterally trying to impose an extraordinarily expensive and controversial policy that he could not get through Congress,” the complaint states at its outset. “This latest attempt to sidestep the Constitution is only the most recent instance in a long but troubling pattern of the President relying on innocuous language from decades-old statutes to impose drastic, costly policy changes on the American people without their consent.”
The student debt issue began to get considerable traction during the early days of the Biden administration. Progressive members of Congress were pushing President Biden to cancel student debt immediately on his own, without explicit legislative authority to do so, on the large scale that the left-wing base of the Democratic Party demanded. On August 24, 2022, the Biden administration caved. It announced that it would cancel $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers with loans owned by the U.S. Department of Education whose annual income was below $125,000 (or $250,000 for married borrowers who file jointly). The cost of this debt burden transfer from college and university student borrowers to all taxpayers was estimated at $430 billion over ten years.
The Biden administration claimed that it did not need any new congressional authority to take this executive action, relying upon a vague provision of the HEROES Act that the administration latched on to as providing its existing authority. Not so, said the Supreme Court.
In the case of Biden v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court ruled last year that the Biden administration lacked such authority to transfer half a trillion dollars of debt from student loan borrowers to the taxpayers. Only Congress can grant such sweeping authority for executive action in clear and explicit language, the Court ruled, because the president cannot “unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.”
President Biden does not care what the Supreme Court says. He is defying the Supreme Court’s decision with a new regulatory rule, set to take full effect this summer. This rule is even worse in terms of the total amount of student debt that it would potentially cancel than the program struck down by the Supreme Court. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania estimated the economic cost of the President’s newest rule to be $475 billion over 10 years, $45 billion more than Biden’s original attempt at executive overreach.
The Biden administration is playing fast and loose with an income-driven repayment system created by Congress, which statutorily permits student loan cancellations for borrowers based on specified income levels and length of the unpaid loans. The Biden administration’s new rule manipulates the legislatively imposed limits set forth in the Higher Education Act.
The administration promotes this enticement for young peoples’ votes as the “Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan.” To date, close to 8 million Americans have enrolled in the SAVE Plan, which is nothing more than a shell game. The SAVE plan saves student borrowers billions of dollars by transferring the cost of their loan obligations to hardworking taxpayers, some of whom never attended a college or university or who have paid off their student loans themselves.
President Biden pushed the envelope even further when, during his visit on April 8th to the battleground state of Wisconsin, he announced far reaching student debt relief for more than 30 million borrowers. This includes relief from unpaid interest for borrowers, irrespective of their income.
“Too many people feel the strain and stress, wondering if they’re going to — can get married, have their first child, start a family, because, even if they get by, they still have this crushing, crushing debt,” President Biden said about the student loan borrowers.
The truth is, however, that too many Americans overall – not just higher education borrowers – are struggling with crushing debt made far worse by Bidenflation.
Credit card debt has soared as Americans try to cope with the surging prices for food, gas, shelter, and other necessities since President Biden took office. Delinquencies on credit card loans have reached their highest level in nearly thirteen years.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, issued by its Center for Microeconomic Data on February 6, 2024, sheds some light on President Biden’s over-emphasis on student loan relief. The report shows that “total household debt increased by $212 billion (1.2%) in the fourth quarter of 2023, to $17.50 trillion.” But student debt comprises only a small portion of the total quarterly increase and of the total amount of household debt as of the fourth quarter of 2023 – $2 billion and $1.6 trillion, respectively. In terms of student debt percentages of these totals, they are less than 1% and 10 %, respectively.
Yet President Biden zeroed in on providing debt relief for higher education student borrowers at the expense of all taxpayers, including many Americans burdened with their own debts who never got to attend a college or university.
The Supreme Court will most likely have to get involved again to stop this president, who lectures us about the dangers to democracy while tearing apart America’s underpinnings as a constitutional republic with checks and balances.