Anyone listening to American Federation of Teachers President
Randi Weingarten
ranting about student loan forgiveness last month has some insight into what is wrong with the nation’s schools. Her
vulgar, raucous diatribe
would have been distasteful and unsuitable coming from anyone educated, let alone from a leader among educators.
“This is what really pisses me off,” she shouted outside Tuesday’s
Supreme Court
hearing. “During the pandemic, we understood that small businesses were hurting and we helped them and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. Big businesses were hurting and we helped them and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. All of a sudden, when it is about our students, they challenge it.”
Weingarten played perhaps the biggest and most malignant single role in depriving a generation of schoolchildren of a year of schooling. She has a lot of nerve showing her face, but then, if there is one quality she can boast, it is nerve.
But she inadvertently made a good point against student loan forgiveness rather than for it. The reason the high court didn’t hear a challenge on help to businesses was that the money was approved in the CARES Act by Congress. That’s 180 degrees different from President Joe Biden’s Caesarean decree that $500 billion to $1 trillion be forgiven, which Congress did not approve. Congress debated a student loan amnesty but deliberately excluded it from the CARES Act. Thus, the business relief was arrived at with constitutional propriety, while student loan forgiveness flouts the democratic process. One can be executed without litigation, while the other probably won’t survive a Supreme Court challenge.
Given her involvement with an educational establishment that for half a century has failed to educate students properly, it is likely that Weingarten is ignorant of the separation of powers doctrine. But liberal justices on the Supreme Court should know better.
The Biden administration’s excuse for forgiving half a trillion or more dollars of student debt rests on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003. It was passed after 9/11 to help military service members manage their college loans when fighting for their country in the War on Terror.
It gave the secretary of education authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to” federal student loans. The purpose of this power, according to the legislation, was to make sure “recipients of student financial assistance … are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of” a national emergency.
But this is not what Biden’s student loan amnesty program does. It is in no way limited to those affected by COVID-19, nor does it aim to protect student borrowers from being worse off than before the pandemic. It is a brand new, broad program creating new benefits for all borrowers, whether or not they were harmed by the pandemic. Its fiscal value goes far beyond any harm caused by COVID-19.
Justice Elena Kagan inadvertently highlighted this herself in a hypothetical case with which she sought to trap Nebraska’s top lawyer. “Suppose, like, there’s an earthquake,” she said, then asked about the secretary of education canceling loans for borrowers whose relatives had been killed.
If only Biden’s debt amnesty were so limited! A more honest analogy would be this: Imagine there is an earthquake in Los Angeles, a national emergency was declared, and then the president uses that as a pretext to eliminate all student debt nationwide, regardless of whether beneficiaries were harmed by the earthquake. That is what Biden has done.
As flimsy as Biden’s case is, the court could still side with the administration if it believes the plaintiffs do not have standing. But even here, the liberal justices’ concerns are inconsistent with the body’s own past jurisprudence.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked a “big-picture question” in which she worried about “the operation of the federal government and its ability to govern” if a plaintiff could easily contest executive actions. But where was this concern in 2019 when Jackson, as a district court judge, issued an injunction against former President Donald Trump’s policy of speeding up deportations for illegal immigrants arrested inside the country? There was an emergency, and she was not concerned about whether legal issues would obstruct Trump’s ability to govern.
Jackson’s immigration ruling was overturned, and in all likelihood, she and the president who appointed her will be on the losing end of this case, too.
