The Biden White House’s Dumbest Line

One of conservatism’s central insights is that nothing is free. They can now embrace the related wisdom that nothing is forgivable. At least, not among those in positions of power who think they can pry some political advantage from those who benefit from magnanimity. That’s the tactic to which the provocateurs who populate the White House’s social-media accounts have appealed:

Apparently, Americans who took advantage of the statutorily sanctioned forgiveness provisions baked into Paycheck Protection Program Act loans should be ashamed of themselves. But only, it seems, if they object to the entirely unrelated, blatantly unconstitutional spending binges on which the Biden White House wants to embark.

Congress designed PPP to serve as a relief program for businesses that suffered as a result of the engineered recession imposed on them by state-level lawmakers at the outset of the pandemic. The program allowed American businesses to keep 51 million jobs from disappearing almost overnight, and the statute contained loan-forgiveness provisions if those businesses used the funds to cover payroll costs, pay rent and utilities, or service their mortgages. The PPP Act was passed in 2020 by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both chambers of Congress. And even though it invited the risk of unbelievable fraud and waste, the emergency provision did what it was designed to do. But rather than criticize those who abused the program, the White House is heaping scorn on those who used it as it was designed — and only to establish in the minds of its least-discerning supporters the narrative that there is hypocrisy afoot.

This isn’t the first time the White House has tried to contend that there is no distinction between the congressionally approved provision of emergency pandemic loans and its desire to raid the treasury for the benefit of America’s least-deserving but nonetheless Democrat-voting citizens. “It was a worthy program,” Biden said of PPP loans in June. “But let’s be clear, some of the same elected Republicans, members of Congress who strongly opposed giving relief to students, got hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves in relief — members of Congress — because of the businesses they were able to keep open.” According to Biden, “The hypocrisy is stunning.” This is a non sequitur. Accusing Republicans of duplicity because they support and take advantage of a legal government program while opposing an unconstitutional abuse of authority is so patently fallacious that it barely merits a response.

It’s only because the White House keeps making this vacuous argument that it cannot be ignored. For well over a year, the scribes who populate online forums with the Biden White House’s agitprop have been itemizing the forgivable loans assumed by Republican lawmakers under the assumption that it makes some sort of point. It doesn’t. This false equivalence has drawn blank stares from its targets, but the White House still appears to think that it is on to something. And yet, for all the efforts to shame Republicans for having the gall to protect their private-sector employees from penury, Biden’s proposed giveaway to a preferred Democratic constituency is no closer to being constitutional. Odd, that.