Is your mortgage a burden? Are you falling behind in your credit card payments? Did you learn too late that your health insurance doesn’t cover your facelift? Well, I’ve got a deal for you! Buy one of my stories (list here), and I’ll wipe out your debt.
Okay, maybe you have doubts about whether that will work. If so, ask yourself how my “forgiveness” of your mortgage differs from Joe Biden’s “forgiveness” of student loans. “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” So says Article I of the United States Constitution. Forgiving debts owed to the United States, that is, destroying the value of government assets, is just as much a drawing of money from the Treasury as sending checks to the debtors. The Biden Administration has conceded as much by claiming that Congress has authorized the President’s action, an argument so preposterous that I direct your attention elsewhere if you want to see that butterfly mangled and torn to pieces.
As everybody who has even superficially followed this issue is aware, the Bidenoi aren’t relying on that broken legal reed. Instead, they count on the difficulty that objectors face in establishing that federal courts have the authority to hear their objections. The doctrine of “standing”, founded upon the Constitution’s grant to the courts of authority to hear only “cases” and “controversies”, mandates that, in order to get into court, “The plaintiff must have (1) suffered an injury in fact, (2) that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of the defendant, and (3) that is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.” Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330, 338 (2016). That has so far been a high hurdle for challengers to the Biden diktat.
Does that mean that no one can stop Joe Biden from spending half a trillion dollars on his own ipse dixit? Not quite. It means, assuming that lack of standing does bring all lawsuits to an end, that no one can stop Joe Biden from saying that half a trillion dollars of unpaid loans have been forgiven, just as no one can stop me from saying that you no longer have to make payments on your mortgage. Since neither I nor Mr. Biden has any legal authority to cancel the debts in question, however, they remain, and creditors can enforce collection.
As soon as a Republican President takes office, his obligation to “to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” will oblige him to direct the Department of Education to resume collecting student debt delinquencies, which will, during the phony Biden moratorium, have accrued additional interest and penalties.
One could go further. Mr. Biden’s action isn’t easily distinguishable from embezzlement of government funds, prompted by base political motives. There are many reasons why he is not even remotely likely to be indicted on criminal charges, but it is clarifying to think that he is just as guilty, in principle, as a bank clerk who excises the record of a loan from his employer’s books. It is an act that history will adjudge infamous. In five hundred billion ways, it is worse than Watergate.
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