Biden Is Still Using PPP against Critics of His Illegal Student-Loan Order

President Biden is still doing this, I see:

Simply put: The president of the United States is attempting to justify his unconstitutional usurpation of Congressional power by singling out a member of Congress for having used a completely unrelated emergency program that his own party supported in the federal legislature. This is grotesque.

The 2020 PPP bill was agreed to almost unanimously. In the Senate, the bill passed by voice vote. In the House, it passed by 388 votes to 5. (Marjorie Taylor Greene was not in Congress at the time.) The bill was uncontroversial because neither party conceived that there was a moral hazard inherent in sending money to people whose dire predicaments had been caused by the government in the first place. The PPP bill was passed via the correct channels; there were no constitutional problems with its terms; and it was clear from the start that the money that had been sent out would not be deemed repayable if it were used for its intended purpose, which was not to enrich its recipients, but to allow businesses that had been shut down to maintain their staff and continue to pay them. That, along with millions of other people, Marjorie Taylor Green used the program in that way is not a hit against her. That is what the bill was for.

President Biden’s illegal student-loan order was not passed through Congress. It did not pass the Senate, and it could not pass the Senate. It did not pass the House, and it could not pass the House. Not only were majorities in both houses of Congress opposed to it on policy grounds, the Democratic Speaker of the House confirmed that it was flatly unconstitutional for the president to act alone as he did. “People think that the President of the United States has the power of debt forgiveness,” Pelosi said last year. “He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” What Biden did was not an act of Congress.

This matters. Congress did not choose to transfer responsibility from the people who took out student loans to the people who did not. Biden did. Congress did not choose to increase the cost of college in the long-run. Biden did. Congress did not choose to add up to a trillion dollars to the national debt. Biden did. Congress recognized the obvious moral hazard inherent in bailing out people to whom nothing unjust has been done. Biden does not. As the old song goes, one of these things is not like the other. PPP was explicitly designed as a bailout. The student-loan program was explicitly designed as . . . well, as a loan program. This was so clear that, in 2010, when Congress passed Obamacare, it explained repeatedly that it had nationalized the student loans system in order to help pay for it.

Since he issued his order, President Biden has behaved like a tyrant. He has asked his OLC to offer up one of the most cynical and ridiculous legal justifications in American history. He has contradicted himself in public, and then dismissed those who noticed. He has repeatedly amended his order on-the-fly in an attempt to avoid judicial review. He has claimed in interviews that the policy passed Congress, when it did not. Now, he is targeting those who dissent from his repeated violations by pretending that their decision to acquiesce with a policy that he, himself, endorsed renders them unable to criticize a completely separate move. For this, and many other reasons, Biden deserves everything that is coming to him on November 8th.