Last week, President Joe Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan has been ruled unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman. While a final resolution is still far off, the ruling is a justified blow to the cynical plan.
The plan, announced by the Biden administration back in August, calls for the forgiveness of up to $20,000 in student loan debt. The estimated amount of debt to be forgiven is $400 billion.
The proposal was never voted on by Congress. The proposal was purely an exercise of executive power by the Biden administration. The justify this, the administration invoked the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003.
The HEROES Act was designed to help people who served in the military in America’s post-9/11 wars, as the preamble to the law makes clear. To do this, the law states the secretary of education “may waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV … in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
The Biden administration seized upon the “national emergency” language of the law, painted the coronavirus pandemic as a national emergency, and thereby declared its action lawful because Congress granted the executive branch to do this.
Judge Pittman notes that while Congress can indeed delegate powers to the executive branch, exercises of such power by the executive branch are only permissible with “clear congressional authorization.”
The judge notes that the HEROES Act doesn’t explicitly mention student loans at all. “If Congress provided clear congressional authorization for $400 billion in student loan forgiveness via the HEROES Act, it would have mentioned loan forgiveness,” he wrote.
Further, even though the pandemic does fall within the concept of a national emergency, “it is unclear whether the [student loan program] is ‘necessary in connection with [that] national emergency.’” Judge Pittman notes that, weeks before the announcement of the plan, President Biden himself publicly declared the pandemic was “over.”
Absent congressional authorization, then, the plan must be vacated, Judge Pittman ruled.
“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,” he wrote. “Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government.”
He’s right.
Even if one supports the concept of mass student loan forgiveness, the appropriate means of getting there is clear: Congress should vote on it. That’s what Congress is for. That President Biden opted not to push a student loan forgiveness bill and instead opted to take a constitutionally suspect route is plainly a failure of leadership