Editors at National Review Online highlight the latest dubious election-year scheme from the Biden-Harris team.

If you can’t beat ’em, bribe ’em. With fewer than two weeks to go in the 2024 presidential election, and just three months left of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Biden-Harris administration has announced yet another round of student-loan “forgiveness.” Last week, the White House divulged that $4.5 billion of loans taken out by public-sector workers would be paid for by taxpayers. This week, the White House granted yet another six-month repayment freeze for up to 8 million borrowers. In total, the Biden-Harris administration has now spent $175 billion transferring or delaying student debt. Had the federal courts not stopped their other schemes, that number would have been on course to hit half a trillion.

That the administration is cramming in one final jubilee is of a piece with how it has approached this project from the start. Understanding that Congress would never have consented to spend that much public money in this manner, the White House has sought at every point to ensure that its conduct was excluded from the customary constitutional processes. It has rewritten unrelated statutes on the fly, declared its actions to be unreviewable by the courts, gamed the rulemaking process to serve its own ends, and, now, attempted to bind its successor to its will. After his initial plan was struck down by the Supreme Court, Biden announced that he would find another way of achieving the same end, whatever it took. He has done so, separation of powers be damned.

The cost of this monomania has been immense. Our deficits are greater, our debt is higher, our social trust is lesser, and our constitutional order has been damaged. There exists no majority in Congress for such a program because there exists no consensus that bailing out the most privileged members of our society is a good idea.