Editors at National Review Online critique President Biden’s latest college student loan bailout.
Last year, after the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s plan to transfer billions in student debt from the people who borrowed the money to taxpayers who did not, Biden said he would “stop at nothing to find other ways” to achieve his unconstitutional goal. This promise, he has kept.
The White House announced its continuation of efforts to “cancel” student debt earlier this week. With the effort to read the HEROES Act, passed after 9/11, to allow blanket debt cancellation for millions having been rebuked by the Supreme Court, White House lawyers have scrounged around the statute books looking for other loopholes to sneak their preferred policies through.
It has instead made the Higher Education Act the object of its motivated reasoning and proposed multiple programs within the Department of Education to transfer student debt piecemeal. A few billion for public employees here, another few billion for people who graduated from bad programs there.
The administration’s announcement contains no total-cost estimate. It in many cases says that debt will be erased automatically, with no requirement that recipients even apply for it. And it’s just as unconstitutional as previous efforts.
Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are suing the federal government over the SAVE plan, one part of the proposal. The lawsuit notes that in the decision that struck down Biden’s student-loan plans last year, the Court said the president can’t “unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.” The estimated cost of that proposal was $430 billion. The estimated cost of this week’s proposal is at least $475 billion. If $430 billion was too large a section of the economy, then $475 billion certainly is as well.
That follows a coalition of eleven states, led by Kansas, which sued the federal government over the SAVE plan in March. “Last time Defendants tried this, the Supreme Court said that this action was illegal. Nothing since then has changed,” the lawsuit says.