If Biden goes through with it, the backlash will be intense, widespread, and as deserved as any in recent memory.
Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove reports:
The White House is planning its long-awaited student loan announcement for tomorrow, sources tell @nancook and me. The parameters are unclear still (to us!), but expectations are that it'll include at least a brief extension on the payment pause and further debt cancellation.
— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) August 23, 2022
If this is true, it would represent a giant middle finger to America. It would represent a middle finger to the Constitution, which vests legislative power in Congress, not the president. It would represent a middle finger to Congress, which has not given the executive branch the authority to give $10,000 each to millions of college students. It would represent a middle finger to the Department of Education, which found last year that it “does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.” Nancy Pelosi confirmed last summer that “the president can’t do it — so that’s not even a discussion.” “Not everybody realizes that,” she said, “but the president can only postpone, delay but not forgive.” Biden’s response? A middle finger.
At the level of the electorate, it would represent a middle finger to voters without college degrees, who have much higher unemployment rates than voters with college educations, and who will now be on the hook for loans they didn’t take out and didn’t benefit from. It would represent a middle finger to voters who chose not to go college — voters who will, as Nancy Pelosi has put it, be “paying taxes to forgive somebody else’s obligations.” It would represent a middle finger to voters who are currently paying back loans taken out for other purposes (their small businesses, say). It would represent a middle finger to voters who have paid off their student loans already, to voters who made sacrifices to prioritize paying off their student loans early, and to voters who deliberately chose colleges that required them to borrow less money. And, because there is no plan or reform attached — it would be a one-time deal — it would represent a middle finger to voters who will take out student loans tomorrow. Sorry, guys. You didn’t time your birth properly to the 2022 midterms.
It would represent a middle finger to voters who care about inflation, which will not be helped by the ruse. It would represent a middle finger to voters who care about the federal debt, which will be made larger at the stroke of a pen. It would represent a middle finger to voters who care about our constitutional order. It would represent a middle finger to voters who want to help the poor rather than send their cash to the most privileged. It would represent a middle finger to voters who care about funding literally anything other than well-off students — which is pretty much all of them. It would represent a middle finger to voters who care about real higher education reform, which the move will slow, and perhaps stop. It would represent a middle-finger to the Democratic Party, which is already fighting headwinds, and which will suffer more at the polls. And, because of the enormous backlash it will cause, it would represent a middle finger to the people at the bottom of our society, who genuinely need help with their education, and who will now be lumped in with the cadre of affluent, self-serving deadbeats who have apparently convinced the President of the United States to violate his oath of office in order to funnel them a bunch of cash.
It would represent, in other words, a 360-degree middle finger to the United States. If Biden goes through with it, the backlash will be intense, widespread, and as deserved as any in recent memory. At one level, Biden’s team seems to know this. But not, apparently, to care.