Three Cheers for the Supreme Court for Stopping Biden's Student Debt Power Grab | Opinion

The Biden administration just got some bad news. On Friday morning, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden's attempt to unilaterally "cancel" (a.k.a. have taxpayers absorb) some $430 billion in student loan debt.

Whether you love student debt relief or hate it, this is absolutely the right decision as a matter of law. President Biden tried to work around the Constitution—and we should applaud the Supreme Court for stopping his illegal student debt power grab.

Remember, under our Constitution, Congress has the "power of the purse," meaning the constitutional authority to spend taxpayer money. And Biden's student debt bailout plan involves spending more than $400 billion in taxpayer funds. The President repeatedly tried to get Congress to pass some form of student debt relief, but our elected representatives refused to do so. This plan only emerged because Biden wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

Biden's Education Department tried to work around Congress and do it anyway via executive fiat. In August 2022, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced a unilateral student debt relief initiative that would "cancel" $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt for most borrowers. But they faced one big problem: How could they possibly legally justify this action?

After all, the Department of Education itself had reviewed its constitutional authority in 2021 and concluded that it couldn't "cancel" student loans without an act of Congress. And even leaders in the Democratic Party like Nancy Pelosi had long acknowledged the simple truth, that while "People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress."

So instead of acknowledging these constitutional barriers and trying to further negotiate with Congress, the Biden administration got creative. It dug up an old 2003 statue called the HEROES Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, that authorized the Education Secretary to "waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs" in "connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency."

Now, no one—and I mean no one—at the time that Congress passed this legislation believed they were authorizing the Department of Education to issue huge amounts of student loan forgiveness for almost all borrowers. Because it simply doesn't. Prior to this plan, the HEROES Act was only ever invoked to make minor changes or alter requirements in specific, narrow circumstances. And it was limited to the "affected individuals" who "suffered direct economic hardship" from whatever national emergency was invoked.

Biden's plan, however, was sweeping, not narrow. What's more, it applied to borrowers regardless of whether they'd been financially harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the emergency the administration invoked. (Ironically, they unveiled this plan just a few weeks before the president said on camera that "the pandemic is over.")

So, Biden's justifications were always an enormous stretch, an abuse of emergency powers to ram through a partisan agenda item the president couldn't get Congress on board with. And you don't have to just take my word for it; even many progressive and liberal legal scholars have acknowledged as much.

"Emergency powers are not meant to address long-standing problems, however dire," the Brennan Center for Justice's Elizabeth Goitein wrote for the Washington Post. "Nor are they meant to provide long-term solutions. And using them to get around Congress, when Congress has considered a course of action and rejected it, is a clear misuse of emergency powers."

"Fundamentally, sidelining Congress through emergency powers means sidelining the checks and balances that safeguard our liberties and democracy," Goitein concluded. "No matter your view of the merits of student debt forgiveness, that's an outcome that should trouble us all."

It's telling that the Biden administration's best hope of winning in court was never actually a defense of their plan on its merits at all. Their strongest argument was not that their plan was legal, but that the people challenging them in court lacked "standing," the legal injury required for one to be allowed to sue over a policy. Biden's best chance was that no one could prove they had standing in court to challenge the plan and so, despite its obviously illegality, it would never get struck down. (They may well have intentionally designed it so it would be hard for opponents to have standing).

But opponents were able to get around this hurdle, eventually. While individuals who sued were found to lack standing, the state of Missouri, which sued alongside a coalition of other red states, was found to have the required standing, because a sub-division of its state government, known as MOHELA, stood to lose millions every month in revenue because of the plan, so the state faced a financial harm that gives them standing. And once that barrier was surmounted, Biden's plan fell apart like a house of cards.

"The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it," Chief Justice John Roberts concluded for the majority. And for anyone who—partisan preferences aside—cares about the Constitution and the rule of law, the answer was always clear.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist and co-host of the BASED Politics podcast.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.