The contempt — the sheer, unbridled contempt — that this administration has for the rule of law can be summed up neatly by this news:
How's he doing it?
Biden is employing a post-9/11 law that allows for debt cancelation "in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency."
Which emergency? "[T]he present COVID-19 pandemic," per a Dept of Ed memo issued yesterday.
h/t @kathrynw5.
— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) August 24, 2022
The full memo is here.
There is no point in our mincing words. This is a lie. A contrivance. A game. Nobody believes this. It’s an excuse. If it makes it to the Supreme Court, it will lose, and it will deserve to lose. It is facially farcical. Of course “The HEROES Act, first enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks” does not convey this authority, as the memo claims. At no point, until today, had a single person in America ever believed such a thing. They shouldn’t now.
When criticizing Donald Trump for making an end run around the legislature in 2019, I wrote that:
To permit presidents to circumvent quotidian policy disputes by appealing to a phantom Too Important Clause is to tear up James Madison’s Constitution and to sanction an alternative settlement within which any sufficiently frustrated executive is able to delve deep into the statutory well and find a watery justification to get his way. “Emergency,” “crisis,” “prosecutorial discretion” — these words all mean something concrete. If, when things get tough for the president he can always find an Enabling Act somewhere in the forest, then we do not have a system of government at all. We have a dictatorship.
This rules applies just as much to Joe Biden. Indeed, given the scale of what Biden is doing, which is more than 100 times as expensive, and far less legally debatable, it applies more so. Joe Biden does not actually believe that he has this authority. Rather, Joe Biden has decided to violate his oath of office, and, in an attempt to cover it up, he has asked his lawyers to scour the statute books and to find any pattern of words that might plausibly serve to convince the partisans in the press that he is acting within the law.
That approach is a disgrace. As I wrote of Trump, when Congress doesn’t act:
the correct response from the White House must be, “Okay.” It must not be, “Let me consult with my lawyers and see if we can combine a few esoteric interpretations into executive carte blanche.”
Besides, Biden’s fake legal argument doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. In May, Biden ended the use of Title 42 at the border on the grounds that Covid-19 no longer represented a national emergency for that purpose. And yet we are supposed to believe that, three months on, Covid-19 remains so much of an emergency that the White House has no choice but to shovel hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to families who are earning up to a quarter of a million dollars per year?
Give me a break.