Editors at the Washington Examiner take aim at Joe Biden’s approach toward the presidency.
Republican voters, we are told, increasingly support the idea of having an authoritarian president, by whom those telling us mean “Donald Trump.” But the same voices completely ignore how authoritarian President Joe Biden is, and how Democratic voters are fine with that.
This week, Biden announced another round of unilateral college loan bailouts without authorization from Congress. The Supreme Court struck down a bigger bailout last year, but Biden told a crowd of cheering Democrats in Madison, Wisconsin, “that didn’t stop us.”
Details of the new bailout have not been released, but the president reportedly intends to rely on different statutory authority for this executive action than he did for the last. Still, it will be unprecedented and not what Congress intended when it passed the Higher Education Act. It will also be challenged in federal court. So here we go again.
Biden’s transparent abuse of executive power for electoral gain might be less galling if he and his administration were not botching the job Congress assigned them to do on student loans. In 2020, Congress passed the bipartisan FAFSA Simplification Act, instructing the Department of Education to do what the title of the act suggests: simplify student aid applications.
The department was supposed to have a new system ready this October, but distracted by bailout efforts, it blew past that deadline, rolled out a faulty product, and then made a huge mistake processing the applications it received. Millions of students are now in limbo. “It’s hard to trust anything by now that the department is saying,” David Sheridan of Columbia University told reporters.
If Biden concentrated more on faithfully executing the laws Congress passed instead of inventing new ones that have no legislative backing, our higher education system would be in better shape.
