Sure, President Joe Biden unilaterally canceling student loan debt without Congressional approval is probably illegal, but whatever. At least, that’s the argument The Washington Post editors are running with.
The Post editorial board ran a dim-witted Mar. 1 editorial headlined: “Biden overreached on student loans. But the court shouldn’t stop him.” The president abused his executive authority when he canceled $10,000 in debt for “most borrowers” and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients on Aug. 24, 2022. The act hit taxpayers with a price tag in the billions, according to CNBC.
The Post admitted that Biden’s plan was “expensive,” “ill-targeted” and “made worse by the fact that Mr. Biden failed to get congressional approval for the $400 billion initiative,” but the editorial board proceeded to do a 180-degree turnaround. “[W]hile we have criticized the Biden plan as a regressive and expensive mistake, we also believe it would be an overreach for the justices to strike it down.”
How exactly would it be an “overreach” for the U.S. Supreme Court to, er, uphold constitutional law?
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas summed up the dangerous overreach of Biden’s plan last week when SCOTUS heard oral arguments debating the law. “In effect, this is a grant of $400 billion,” said Thomas. “[I]t runs headlong into Congress' appropriations authority." The Post, in effect, just shrugged this off.
According to The Post drivel, “[t]here are limits that restrict when and how the court can exercise its authority — and this is one of the instances in which it should recognize those limits.”
In the paper’s view, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit suing the Biden administration’s potentially unconstitutional overreach “‘lack standing’” — or a “concrete stake in the outcome — to challenge the law.”
But as The National Review editorial board pointed out, “it does no violence to the law of standing to allow state governments to vindicate the rights of state-government entities that have unquestionably suffered harm from an overreaching president claiming vast emergency powers over domestic politics.”
Wow. WaPo actually goes with “illegal but legal because a Democrat did it” https://t.co/Sgh8UGt02B
— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) March 2, 2023
The Post continued to spiral down the cesspool of its illogic. The newspaper conceded that Biden founded his legal basis upon “a questionable reading of the” 2003 Heroes Act. A “straightforward reading” of the Heroes Act suggests “that it permits aid targeted at those who would struggle to repay their loans as a direct result of a serious emergency.”
But, as The Post previously noted, “many” of the borrowers who would benefit from Biden’s actions “can afford to pay back the money they borrowed to obtain degrees that boost their earning power over a lifetime,” which essentially undercuts the shaky legal premise that Biden is reportedly waving around.
Apparently, a president being held accountable for violating the law doesn’t hold too much weight for The Post as long as the person in the Oval Office holds the correct left-wing political views.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and demand it stop its PR stunt defending Biden’s potentially illegal executive action on student debt.
