(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – Over the weekend, President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic is now over. Yet, that is the same pandemic he is using to justify canceling student loan debt.
As Reason Magazine argues in “Biden Inadvertently Declares His Student Loan Forgiveness Program Illegal“:
“When Biden announced his debt cancellation plan last month, administration lawyers cited the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students, or HEROES Act, of 2003, a post 9/11 law that ‘permits the Secretary of Education to waive or modify Federal student financial assistance program requirements to help students and their families or academic institutions affected by a war, other military operation, or national emergency.’
“The law was clearly intended as a vehicle to give the president the power to forgive student loan debt for individuals directly involved in fighting the war on terror. But in Biden‘s revisionist citation, it became an all-purpose tool for mass debt forgiveness via executive action, premised on the argument that the COVID-19 pandemic was an ongoing national emergency.” [emphasis added]
What did Biden do as he manipulated the law? And what did Biden just do by declaring the pandemic over?
“The pandemic, in this formulation, gave Biden extraordinary powers—powers that under normal circumstances the president would not have.
“It was an inherently dubious justification, given the novel and expansive reading of the HEROES Act. But Biden completely undercut it on a 60 Minutes interview this weekend when he declared, flatly, that ‘the pandemic is over.’“ [emphasis added]
Bottom line: Joe Biden can’t have it both ways. He can’t argue his student debt cancelation plan is legal because of the pandemic while simultaneously announcing that the pandemic is over.
“The pandemic is over," Biden said in a recent interview.
If the pandemic is over, then there is no ongoing national emergency, which means that the already shaky legal ground on which the Biden administration based its action has now collapsed entirely. https://t.co/8GGR8jk2ew
— reason (@reason) September 19, 2022
What is your opinion? Do you believe Biden has the authority to cancel student loans in the way he did, or do you think he broke the law? Please share your thoughts by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
