Pressure is building on Joe Biden from far-left activists to find some other justification for keeping his plan to forgive $400 billion in student loans if the Supreme Court, as expected, finds it unconstitutional.
A little thing like the Constitution of the United States shouldn’t get in the way of the hard left’s political agenda. So advocates like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are urging Biden to ignore the Supreme Court’s decision and just go ahead and forgive the loans anyway.
The student loan forgiveness case — Biden v. Nebraska — could prove to be the most consequential case of the term. But the left won’t be satisfied unless every dollar borrowed is forgiven — and that includes any loans taken on by students during the pandemic.
Why would we think that Biden would ignore the court and find another legal justification to forgive the debt? Because he’s done it before. During the pandemic, the CDC issued a moratorium on evictions from homes and apartments in order to “stop the spread of the virus and to avoid having renters wind up in shelters or other crowded living conditions, compounding the crisis,” according to the New York Times.
It was a BS reason, and everyone knew it — including the Supreme Court, which eventually struck down the moratorium. But the Biden administration issued a new moratorium on Aug. 3, 2021, daring the court to once again strike it down. It did — in record time.
So Biden probably has alternative legal justifications that will allow him to try again by changing a few words here and there and wait for the challenge to wend its way to Washington through the lower courts.
The problem, frets a Fordham Law professor, Jed Shugerman, is that using the education act could drag out the amnesty past the 2024 election. For activists, what else is the point? Liberal groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are among those standing at the “ready to bombard the White House” with phone calls and e-mails urging Mr. Biden to act if the court rules against him, Bloomberg reports.
Liberals in the Congress, like Senator Sanders, are also muttering about acting in defiance of the high court on the loan amnesty. “It’s an issue we’re going to deal with, aggressively,” the Vermont Socialist says. This kind of talk, coming at a time when the left is raising doubts about the “legitimacy” of the high court — and the personal ethics of the justices themselves — adds to the gravity of what is shaping up as a dangerous moment for the Constitution.
We can hope that the Supreme Court ends up writing a decision with such clarity and force that the left has no wriggle room to try and sneak in another bite at the apple. While a rarity, if the majority feels strongly enough about an issue, it’s possible that it will attempt to shut down any challenge then and there.
Unfortunately, the court is not usually so definitive in deciding issues like this. So we’re likely to have to go through this legal merry-go-round again and again until a final determination by the court is forthcoming.
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