Earlier this week it seemed that President Joe Biden had pivoted sharply on student loans, reportedly expressing in meetings that his administration is “looking at different options” for forgiving them entirely. (Though comments two days later seemed to walk back this position.) If he goes for it, it would be a wild leap beyond what he proposed in his campaign—a $10,000 cancellation event—and an even wilder leap from the position he took at a town hall event in early 2021 that seemed to imply it bothered him that widespread loan cancellation would benefit high earners, or as he put it, “people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.”

I’ve written in the past that I didn’t think Biden really wanted to do loan cancellation, despite pressure from the progressive wing of his party. That’s why he came up with the smallest cancellation plan among major democratic candidates in the 2020 presidential primary, and it’s why he has largely punted the issue to Congress since taking office, claiming a lack of legal authority to execute his campaign promise without legislation.