If congressional Republicans won’t push back on the president’s ‘loan forgiveness’ schemes, what purpose do they serve?
Since the summer of last year, Joe Biden has spent $130 billion transferring money from Americans who did not take out loans to pay for college to Americans who did take out loans to pay for college. Over the next few years, Biden intends to spend an additional $345 billion in this manner. Question: How are we going to pay for this perfidy?
Or, rather: Who is going to pay for this? Obviously, the answer can’t be “taxpayers.” Sure, in the short run, that’ll be how these transfers work. But in the long run? After Biden is out of power? Presumably, we are not to expect that the people who didn’t take out those loans and spend them on a service that they received ought to be taxed to pay for those who did? That would be absurd. So I’ll ask again: Where is the cash going to come from? Are we going to claw the money back from the people who were given the free ride? Are we going to take it from the universities themselves — many of which have enormous, unassessed endowments? Are we going to give a tax break to anyone who didn’t receive this largesse? All of these options have their upsides and downsides. At least one of them must become law.
Why? Because what President Biden has done here represents an extraordinary violation of the social compact, that’s why. This isn’t alms for the poor; it’s a brazen cash-grab by Joe Biden’s friends. Biden likes college graduates in a way that he doesn’t like small-business owners, plumbers, or waitresses, so he has decided to send the property of small-business owners, plumbers, and waitresses to those college graduates. That’s it. That’s the whole game. There’s no principle here; the debts owed by others remain untouched. There’s no reform here; the education system remains exactly as it was before this started. The game is exactly how it looks: Peter, general contractor, has been robbed to pay Paul, Ph.D. It’s shameless class politics — and not in that dishonest boy-made-good-from-Scranton way that Joe Biden likes to pretend. To the victors, the spoils.
The civic implications are also grotesque. On Twitter, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern says that John Roberts blocked President Biden’s flagrantly illegal attempt to conduct a massive one-time transfer because he wanted “anti-Biden leftists” to “blame the president for their continued student debt.” But this is exactly the wrong way around. Roberts blocked Biden’s order because, as everyone — even Nancy Pelosi — knew, it was unconstitutional. It is Biden who has been attracted to the rank politics of the thing, having first taken the opportunity to demagogue the judiciary for having had the temerity to do its job, and then having engaged in an attempt to make Americans believe that he is bravely defying that judiciary’s order. “The Supreme Court blocked it,” Biden said this week. “But that didn’t stop me.” Ah.
Already, this behavior has become habitual. To spend $475 billion on the most privileged people in America could be regarded as an aberration; to do it hot on the heels of our spending $275 billion on a loan-pausing program for the very same people looks like an addiction. In the coming years, that addiction must be broken, and restitution must be paid to those it hurt. I am not usually of the view that Republicans are feckless and useless, but if the party does not use its power to achieve that restitution then I do not know what the point of the Republicans is supposed to be. Irrespective of the legality of Biden’s piecemeal attempt at a mass jubilee — and that legality ranges from highly questionable to absolutely laughable — Congress can change or clarify the laws any time that it wishes. The GOP runs the lower house within that Congress. If it does not push hard for a change, then I shall conclude that it does not care. And if it does not care, then it deserves to wither and disappear.
Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.
Reprinted with Permission from National Review – By Charles C. W. Cooke
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