The people's voice of reason
The people's voice of reason
President Joe Biden
August 9, 2024 - a federal appeals court blocked President Joseph R. Biden's (D) latest student debt relief plan. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 3-0 ruling extends the pause in the program that it ordered last month. This updated ruling blocks Biden's Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan until the court resolves the lawsuit. That could take months.
The Court called the plan a "vast assertion of newfound power" and said that the Biden administration failed to show that there was any clear authorization from Congress giving the President unilateral authority to forgive billions of dollars of student loans.
"The new SAVE plan ... is an order of magnitude broader than anything that has come before," the court wrote in a ten page opinion.
The panel rejected the administration scheme to go around a previous ruling where a federal district judge invalidated portions of the plan previously.
Seven Republican state attorneys general sued over the SAVE plan, which was introduced last year after the Supreme Court struck down Biden's universal student debt relief program over grounds that the Congress had given the President no such authority and that the Constitution does not allow the President to make law.
Biden's plan had raised the income protected from payments from 150 percent above the federal poverty guidelines to 225 percent and waived accrued unpaid interest outside of the calculated payments. Biden would have also dropped undergraduate student loan repayments from ten percent of discretionary income to five percent while giving out other loan forgiveness options to various favored groups.
Student loan borrowers have received a number of varying announcements and instructions on their loans over the course of the Biden administration with one letter often conflicting with previous letters and many borrowers unsure of whether their loans were forgiven or not. Without Biden's varying pronouncements on student loans and without the pause on student loan repayments during the COVID economic shutdown millions of student loan borrowers would be much further along on repaying down their debt.
Three Republican state attorneys general have filed an emergency request to the Supreme Court asking that the Supremes block the second half of the Biden plan.
Friday's ruling means that the Biden Justice Department may file their own emergency appeal at the Supreme Court.
We were all taught in elementary school that Congress passes laws and the President enforces the laws. The Biden administration has not worked like that at all.
Joe Biden has thwarted the will of Congress by not enforcing any of the immigration laws on the books.
The President has reinterpreted decades old Title IX legislation to allow males who claim that they are females to play sports against girls and threatened schools from elementary to universities that do not adhere to his bizarre gender ideology theories with loss of federal funds.
He has sought to expands federal authority over land use by rewriting the definition of the waters of the U.S. rules.
He ordered over a hundred million American workers to take the experimental COVID-19 vaccine.
He used executive authority to thwart state laws protecting the unborn.
He gave billions of dollars to Iran solely on his authority, which Iran later used to fund a terror war on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.
His Justice Department has waged an unrelenting legal war on anyone who questioned the results of the 2020 election.
He has shut down pipelines, limited coal mining in North Dakota, taken millions of acres of oil lease rights away. H
e has forced whole industries to adopt experimental new technologies such as electric cars and solar farms as part of his climate change theory.
Time after time Biden and his administration has broadly expanded federal authority through rewriting of federal rules.
With Congress almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats none of his historic expansion of the administrative state has been effectively limited by Congress. The courts have been the primary place where his directives have faced scrutiny, Biden has responded by attacking the courts and has challenged the legitimacy of the Supreme Court more than any President in the last 85 years.
The fate of the President's student loan program, which never passed Congress, will likely be determined by the Supreme Court that he so clearly despises.
(Based on original reporting by the Hill)
To connect with the author of this story, or to comment, email brandonmreporter@gmail.com
Reader Comments(0)