A federal judge has blocked Joe Biden's student debt relief scheme. Politico. The Texas judge said that the program was “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.” The effort had already been put on temporary hold due to a ruling in a separate case. 16 million people have already applied for the debt relief and it is unclear if other people will be able to apply after the order. Biden has said previously that he would fight any efforts to block student debt relief. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two people that did not qualify for the full $20,000 debt relief.
My Comment:
This was a fully expected outcome to this case. Biden never had the authority to ever do this in the first place, it's congress that decides spending, and they had never agreed to student debt relief. It is not a surprise at all that the effort was overturned. Indeed, it would have been shocking if it hadn't been.
And I fully expect that Biden will lose this on appeal as well. Like I said, he had no authority to spend millions of dollars on student debt relief without approval from congress. This will be held up on appeal and if it makes it to the Supreme Court the ruling will be the same. All Biden is doing is wasting time and money to appeal this case.
Student debt relief was deeply unpopular among people that didn't benefit from it. I know that I always thought that it was a slap in the face to everyone who paid for college on their own and paid off their debt. And it was also a slap in the face to everyone who never got to go to college in the first place. I can't complain too much, I got a lot of help from my family and mostly only had to pay for my books and some other expenses, but I do think it was B.S. that they never would have gotten one thin dime out of this. But they and everyone else who didn't benefit from this scheme would end up having to pay for it.
The timing of this ruling is not the best, to say the least. Biden was able to say that he had been able to keep a campaign promise with this program, even though he knew that it was likely to be overturned. It was essentially a bribe to vote for the Democrats in the midterms and an extremely cynical one at that. Biden and the Democrats knew damn well that not a single check was going to be sent out.
Would this ruling have affected the midterms? I think it might have. Though I doubt there would be anyone who would have voted for Republicans because of this, I do think some of the Democrats out there would have stayed home if they knew that the student debt relief was never actually going to happen.
What is confusing is that the Republicans didn't harp on this during the election campaign. They had to know that this was going to be the outcome in this case, but why wasn't it used in campaign commercials? Doing so would have probably demoralized the Democratic vote enough that they would have had more success on Tuesday.
Of course, it's not totally too late. The runoff election in Georgia is coming up next month and if the Republicans are smart they will harp on this issue. It could be the difference between a win and loss in that election. But given the... questionable... decisions the RNC made this election cycle, I am not sure that they will.
Student debt relief appears to be a dead issue. The Democrats couldn't get it passed with control of both the House and Senate and now it appears very unlikely that they will have that again anytime soon. Biden can't do it by himself and there are no other options to get it done. People will have to actually pay off their debts.
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