A U.S. president isn’t a king. No matter how much some who hold the office would wish it otherwise.
Even if you believe in your heart of hearts that student loan indebtedness is a terrible problem for a great many people, you can still question the way that President Joe Bidenwent about erasing up to $20,000 in debt per borrower.
Because what he did was effectively to wave his presidential magic wand and make the debt vanish. Without the OK of Congress.
If you think this just fine and dandy — because of your feelings about student-loan debt — you’d do well to consider the ramifications of allowing a president to make such a sweeping change on his own authority. Because if what Biden did wasn’t out of bounds, then some future president can decide, on his own authority, to act on one or another issue without the OK of the legislative branch. And this is not how it is supposed to work in America.
On Tuesday, Biden’s move to forgive great swaths of student loan debt ran up against its first serious legal challenge. There could well be more to come. This challenge came from the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian nonprofit firm.
A president of the United States has circumscribed powers as spelled out in Article II of the Constitution. Those powers are, in fact, quite limited. The authority granted to Congress is detailed in Article I. It shouldn’t take much more than a cursory reading of those two articles to understand clearly that Biden’s move to forgive student loans was built on awfully shaky ground. In fact, Biden himself said as much back when the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was urging him to go big on debt relief. Until he began singing a different tune, of course.
In our constitutional republic, the citizens have a right to expect a good bit of consistency, not only from year to year, but also from administration to administration. When a new president is sworn into office, the old rules don’t fly out the window. Not without Congress first enacting new laws, anyway.
Biden knows this better than most. He was, after all, a U.S. senator for 36 years.
But now that he’s president, the niceties of lawmaking, of playing by the rules, are apparently just so much piffle.
— Tribune News Service
