TIPP: Biden’s student loan waiver faces headwinds

By TIPP EDITORIAL BOARD, TIPP Insights

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

That was Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas citing James Madison from Federalist No. 47 in his 26-page ruling that President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program was unconstitutional.

Former President Trump nominated Judge Pittman to the federal bench in 2017.

President Biden’s plan forgives up to $10,000 in federal student debt for those making under $125,000 a year and households making under $250,000. It waives $20,000 for Pell grant recipients.

Biden’s executive action would cost around $400 billion and transfer that liability onto taxpayers’ shoulders.

Does the President have the power to forgive student loans? Judge Pittman says Biden’s plan unlawfully used Congress’s legislative power and must be revoked.

The judge decided the case based on the separation of powers. He noted, “[N]o one can plausibly deny that it is either one of the largest delegations of legislative power to the executive branch or one of the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.”

The judge also noted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi acknowledged that the president lacked the authority to forgive student loans.

The HEROES Act, a law to provide loan assistance to military personnel defending our nation, allows the Education Department to modify student loans in a national emergency.

In late August, President Biden announced the plan leveraging the HEROES Act. He cited the COVID pandemic as a national emergency. In a September interview, Biden declared the pandemic was over.

The Plaintiffs in the Texas case were two students, one who did not qualify for Biden’s plan since she had gotten student loans from a private lender, and the other whose loans did not qualify for forgiveness because he did not receive Pell grants while in college.

The judge ruled that the plaintiffs fulfilled the three requirements to have the needed standing.

He determined that the students had been harmed because they could not “obtain the full benefit of debt forgiveness under the Program” due to eligibility requirements they did not meet.

The program was passed without the requisite notice-and-comment period under the Administrative Procedure Act fulfilling causation, the second standing requirement.

Redressability, the third requirement of standing, is met because striking down the program may cause the defendants to “reconsider the confines of the Program,” the judge opined.

Meanwhile, in a recent TIPP Poll, most Americans (65%) believed midterm election politics drove Biden’s generosity. By a margin of 59% to 32%, Americans believed that Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan “is unfair to those whose children are not in college or who have already paid for their kid’s education to have to pay for other people’s education.”

Interestingly, the Left is fighting among themselves. On Friday, Briahna Joy Gray, who previously served as a press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, claimed President Biden baited young voters with a “faulty” student-loan forgiveness order. “They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turnout — knowing it wasn’t going anywhere because they relied on faulty legal authority,” she wrote in a tweet. “Hard to convince me the Biden administration didn’t do this intentionally.”

As a result of the judge’s ruling, the government has stopped accepting applications for student debt relief. More than 16 million applications have already been approved. A total of 26 million had started the process. The Justice Department has appealed the Texas verdict.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis put loan forgiveness on hold last month while it looked into a challenge from six Republican-led states.

The Supreme Court will most likely decide the fate of Biden’s plan in the end. Meanwhile, President Biden boosted the young voter turnout on November 8, an unstatesmanlike bad example in politics that you can expect from Biden, just like he uses the strategic petroleum reserve as his strategic political reserve.

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