This past week, the U.S. Supreme Court took up legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s executive action to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt.
To recap, in 2021, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear that the president did not have the authority to cancel student loan debt without explicit authorization from Congress.
“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” she said. “He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power.”
Two years before that, Pelosi strongly condemned then-President Donald Trump’s use of executive authority to divert funding to the border wall without explicit authorization from Congress. Specifically, she condemned “the president’s attempt to negate our system of separation of powers, which is the genius of our Constitution, by assaulting Congress’s exclusive constitutional power of the purse. Despite what the president may think, Article II does not mean that he can ‘do whatever he wants.”
Pelosi was right on both points. Congress exists to debate and make the fundamental decisions about what the federal government is going to do. Presidents, bureaucrats and activists across the political spectrum generally don’t like that because Congress is inherently messy, slow to act and is made up of people who don’t share the same priorities.
This is why we frequently see presidents from both parties test the limits of what they can get away with without getting explicit direction from Congress.
Which brings us back to President Biden’s announcement last summer that his administration would be canceling student loan debt of up to $20,000 for qualified borrowers.
Officially, the Biden administration is relying on a creative interpretation of a 2003 law aimed at providing relief to people in the military during the ramp-up of the war on terror. The Biden administration claims the coronavirus pandemic provides a similar justification, which is an especially goofy claim given that he himself declared that “the pandemic is over” last September.
Related: Joe Biden’s student loan plan is about buying votes, not solving problems
But in any case, there was nothing stopping Biden from calling on Congress to just vote on student loan forgiveness. After all, the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate for the first two years of Biden’s presidency. If they cared so much about the issue, they could have put in the work to do something through Congress.
But Biden didn’t do that. It’s obvious why. He knew Congress wouldn’t do it.
Republicans would throw up objections based on the fiscal impact of taking on hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars in additional debt. Likewise, some Democrats would have wondered, going into the midterms, whether it really made sense to bail out an objectively more privileged set of people (mostly people with college degrees with better long-term income prospects than the average American) when there are millions more Americans who would wonder why they aren’t being helped out like that.
Related: ‘Nah’ to student loan debt forgiveness
So, instead, Biden decided to take executive action knowing it would end up being challenged and end up before a conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, which clearly isn’t afraid to knock down what they view as instances of federal overreach.
Obviously, President Biden was using the student loan issue to manipulate young Americans going into the midterms and didn’t care that he was at best taking a gamble by raising the issue in the first place. After all, if the court spikes it, it’s because of the evil Republicans (not the inability of Biden to get Congress to do something) and if the court somehow rejects the challenges, he gets the credit.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com