NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE S ince last summer, President Biden has been trying to unilaterally redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars to a group of Americans who already out-earn the average worker. With the Democrats’ inflation already crushing blue-collar families, the president wants to make our nation’s cashiers, construction workers, waitresses, truck drivers, tradespeople, and veterans absorb student-loan debt that was voluntarily taken on by fellow citizens including doctors and lawyers who make six figures.
President Biden’s stab at student-loan socialism is wildly unfair to millions of families who chose to make different kinds of sacrifices to avoid debt. But the problems with the policy do not stop there. The president’s gambit also has fundamental legal problems that we and 41 other Republican senators detailed in a brief we submitted to the Supreme Court. These issues came to a head last week when the Court heard oral arguments concerning some of the most consequential separation-of-powers questions it has ever considered.
Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative powers in Congress. Our Founders knew the central aspect of those powers would be Congress’s control over spending — the power of the purse. Yet the president is trying to wave a magic wand and wipe away a staggering half-trillion dollars in debts owed the United States without any approval from Congress whatsoever. Even then-speaker Pelosi, less than two years ago, admitted that this level of presidential overreach would be impossible: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not . . . that has to be an act of Congress.”
The president’s supposed pretext for this historic power grab is the HEROES Act, legislation that Congress passed after the September 11th terrorist attacks. This law, which was primarily intended to help active-duty servicemembers, allows the government to undertake modest measures to prevent certain individuals from falling behind on their loans when “necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
In a naked effort to buy votes heading into last year’s midterms, President Biden has tried to stretch and twist this law beyond recognition. Even as his own administration has been forced into finally ending the official Covid-emergency declarations in the coming months, the president pretends that the pandemic justifies a permanent half-trillion-dollar handout. Moreover, the same Democrats who are insisting that student-loan borrowers are trapped in emergency-level economic hardship are simultaneously touring the country demanding applause for what they say is an excellent economy for the American people on their watch. In short, even this administration’s own actions and claims debunk their fake justifications for this huge and regressive wealth transfer.
As Senate Republicans explained in our brief, President Biden’s attempt to steamroll the separation of powers violates the constitutional principle known as the “major questions” doctrine. This legal rule is based on the simple fact that when Congress intends to make sweeping policy decisions or huge new devolutions of power to the executive branch, we say so clearly. As a result, the Supreme Court has held that a strong presumption lies against claims that the executive has unearthed some sweeping new unilateral power that was previously hidden away like buried treasure in oblique provisions or old statutes.
At last week’s oral argument, a majority of the justices appeared to share our constitutional concerns. Chief Justice Roberts, who took a limited view of executive power while blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to rescind DACA, wondered out loud why the same principles would not apply here. Justice Kavanaugh reflected that many of the Court’s finest moments throughout history came when the justices reined in runaway executive branches.
The constitutional and legal questions at stake are enormous. They go to the core of the system of self-government the Framers gave us. But to ordinary Americans at kitchen tables across the country, it is the moral problems with President Biden’s student-loan socialism that speak the loudest of all. As Chief Justice Roberts observed at last week’s argument, “Nobody’s telling the person who is trying to set up [a] lawn-service business that he doesn’t have to pay his loan. He still does, even though his tax dollars are going to support the forgiveness of the loan for the college graduate, who’s now going to make a lot more than him over the course of his lifetime.”
Student-loan socialism is an issue where the questions of legality, constitutionality, policy prudence, and basic fairness all align in perfect harmony — against the Biden administration. Like Speaker Pelosi said less than two years ago, President Biden lacks the power to take this lawless and regressive step. The Court should stop him.
Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) is the Senate Republican leader. Marsha Blackburn is the senior U.S. senator from Tennessee.