One of my greatest pleasures as a writer at PJ Media is delivering good news to our readers, and today I have an excellent development to report. On Monday, federal judges in two states blocked Joe Biden's latest scheme to buy votes with taxpayer money.
You may recall that last summer, the Supreme Court killed "President" Biden's diktat that sought to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. The executive branch simply didn't have the authority to dump that big a cost onto the public, the justices ruled. In typical Democrat fashion, the Biden administration tinkered with its scheme, made it bigger, rebranded it as the SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) program, and promptly relaunched it.
Still in denial about SAVE's bleak prospects, CNN describes the scheme in the present tense, as if it will surely go forward after a brief pause:
Like existing income-driven repayment plans, SAVE ties monthly payments to a borrower's income and family size. But the SAVE plan offers the most generous terms, especially for low-income borrowers.
More than 8 million borrowers have enrolled in SAVE so far, and 4.6 million of them have a $0 monthly payment.
Borrowers enrolled in SAVE may also be eligible for student debt relief in a shorter amount of time than under other income-driven plans. Those who borrowed $12,000 or less will see their debt forgiven after paying for just 10 years under SAVE. Every additional $1,000 borrowed above that amount would add one year of monthly payments to the required time a borrower must pay. Under other repayment plans, borrowers must make at least 20 years of payments before receiving debt forgiveness.
The SAVE plan also prevents balances from ballooning due to interest when a borrower has a small monthly payment. If enrolled in SAVE, unpaid interest does not accrue if a borrower makes a fully monthly payment. For example, if $50 in interest accumulates each month and a borrower's full required payment is just $30, the remaining $20 would be waived.
In the Spring of 2024, seven states coalesced behind Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and 11 behind Kansas AG Kris Kobach to once again challenge the White House's machinations. The Kansas complaint said SAVE "transforms many or most loans into outright grants from the federal government - without any appropriation from Congress."
In the Missouri complaint, the participating states said, “Just last year, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the President to force teachers, truckers, and farmers to pay for the student loan debt of other Americans—to the enormous tune of $430 billion. In striking down that attempt, the Court declared that the President cannot ‘unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.’ Undeterred, the President is at it again, even bragging that ‘the Supreme Court blocked it. They blocked it. But that didn’t stop me.’”
Biden's SAVE loan forgiveness is expected to cost taxpayers up to $475 billion.
The States noted, “Yet again, the President is unilaterally trying to impose an extraordinarily expensive and controversial policy that he could not get through Congress. This latest attempt to sidestep the Constitution is only the most recent instance in a long but troubling pattern of the President relying on innocuous language from decades-old statutes to impose drastic, costly policy changes on the American people without their consent.”
And now, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree in Kansas and U.S. District Judge John Ross in Missouri have halted Biden's redistributionist dreams.
"Together, the two rulings, each by a judge appointed by former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, appeared to greatly limit the scope of the Biden administration’s efforts to help borrowers after the U.S. Supreme Court last year rejected the Democratic president’s first attempt at a forgiveness plan," reports Missouri's Spectrum News. "Both judges said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exceeded the authority granted by Congress in laws dealing with students' loans."
The decisions allowed parts of the plan to go forward, acknowledging a 1993 law that grants the DOE authority to structure repayment plans for federal student loans — but not the authority to transfer that debt to uninvolved Americans who get nothing in return.
🚨BREAKING: The Court has granted our motion to BLOCK Joe Biden’s illegal student loan plan.
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) June 24, 2024
Congress never gave Biden the authority to saddle working Americans with half-a-trillion dollars in other people's debt.
A huge win for the Constitution.
"Today, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced that the Eastern District of Missouri granted his motion to block Joe Biden’s latest illegal student loan cancellation scheme. His lawsuit targeted what the federal government calls the 'SAVE' Plan, which in reality would have cost Americans $475 billion – $45 billion more than its last unlawful student loan plan," said Bailey's office in a statement. "The Court’s order blocks the unconstitutional student loan cancellation scheme from taking effect on July 1."
"Kansas’s victory today is a victory for the entire country," Kansas AG Kobach's office stated in a post on X. "As the court correctly held, whether to forgive billions of dollars of student debt is a major question that only Congress can answer. Biden’s administration is attempting to usurp Congress’s authority."
"This is not only unconstitutional, it’s unfair," the office added. "Blue collar Kansas workers who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees."
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The Biden administration had already canceled $5.5 billion in debt by the time the judges provided taxpayers with relief on Monday. The candidate's attempts to buy votes with student loan debt forgiveness will now be on hold until the states' suits can be fully litigated.
With any luck, we'll have a sane new administration by then, and it will become a moot point.
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