I wrote about the supposed legal justification for the Biden loan forgiveness at length for Politico:
It is telling that when Congress passed this act nearly 20 years ago after the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush signed it into law, no one thought Washington had created the predicate for a sweeping imposition of debt forgiveness by the executive branch. The act passed the Republican House 421-1 and the Republican Senate by unanimous consent, not the usual legislative path for measures allowing for a student-debt jubilee.
Who are the “affected individuals” under the HEROES Act? It is clear they are not supposed to be the entire population. As a summary of the legislation at Congress.gov notes, they are active-duty military personnel, National Guard troops, someone residing in a disaster area or someone who “suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military action or national emergency.”
Congress was clearly seeking to hold harmless the Marine with student loans who might in the years ahead be spending significant time overseas in combat zones. . . .
There is no doubt that [the pandemic] has caused considerable hardship and disruption. It simply can’t be true that everyone covered by the Biden program was a loser from the pandemic, though.
What with the cascade of spending from Washington amounting to trillions of dollars, including direct checks and supplemental unemployment benefits, some people were better off during the pandemic. And what about students whose parents worked as executives for the big winners during the pandemic, say, Moderna, Netflix or Zoom? Their families might have experienced windfalls.
If there’s no effort to distinguish winners from losers, then there’s no real effort to abide by the HEROES act. Plus, the beneficiaries aren’t being prevented from finding themselves in a worse position, as the text of the legislation states; they are affirmatively being put in a better position.