Judge Reminds Biden No One Voted for His Bailout

The Journal’s Gabriel Rubin and Andrew Restuccia report:

A federal judge in Texas on Thursday struck down the Biden administration’s student-debt forgiveness plan, imperiling a key administration priority that would have canceled up to $20,000 in student loans for tens of millions of borrowers.

The Biden administration’s plan is an “unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power” that also failed to go through normal regulatory processes, Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas wrote in a 26-page opinion.

The decision reminds the president that he runs just one branch of our government:

The Constitution vests “all legislative powers” in Congress. This power, however, can be delegated to the executive branch. But if the executive branch seeks to use that delegated power to create a law of vast economic and political significance, it must have clear congressional authorization. If not, the executive branch unconstitutionally exercises “legislative powers” vested in Congress. In this case, the HEROES Act—a law to provide loan assistance to military personnel defending our nation—does not provide the executive branch clear congressional authorization to create a $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.

The Program is thus an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.

A helpful footnote adds:

The Court expresses no opinion on whether the Program constitutes sound or unsound public policy—a consideration inappropriate for the Court to contemplate—as it falls outside the Court’s task of merely interpreting the law.

The footnote quotes George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence:

Compassion… ought not to influence a judge, in whom, acting officially, apathy is less a vice than sympathy.

The informative footnote then quotes

Thomas Jefferson

:

Let mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge, or of the executive power, will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing men.

The judge then proceeds to obliterate Biden administration legal arguments, while also noting that before the president decided to attempt to act unilaterally, there was a bipartisan recognition that he could not. The Trump administration had concluded congressional authorization would be necessary for such a massive program. The judge also cites a 2021 declaration from Speaker of the House

Nancy Pelosi

:

People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. . . He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power. That has to be [accomplished through] an act of Congress.

Judge Pittman also cites recent Supreme Court precedent undercutting the Biden position that vague language in law can be exploited to erect significant new federal programs. The judge notes “the crystallization of the long-developing major-questions doctrine in West Virginia. v. EPA,” and adds:

The doctrine provides that when an agency seeks to resolve a major question, a “merely plausible textual basis for the agency action” is not enough.

Rather, an executive department must have “clear congressional authorization” for the power it is claiming.

The current leader of our executive branch cannot pretend that his taxpayer-funded bailout isn’t massive. The judge adds:

… no one can plausibly deny that it is either one of the largest delegations of legislative power to the executive branch, or one of the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.

In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone. Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government. As President James Madison warned, “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” THE FEDERALIST NO. 47.

The Court is not blind to the current political division in our country. But it is fundamental to the survival of our Republic that the separation of powers as outlined in our Constitution be preserved.

Amen. Let’s hope the clarity of the decision will persuade the White House to abandon its eccentric impulses and return to the constitutional path of seeking congressional approval for appropriations.

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Speaking of Clarity
Here’s an excerpt from the official White House transcript as Mr. Biden passed reporters Thursday night on his way to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House:

Q Are you hopeful that the conflict will be resolved with Russia and Ukraine, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, I don’t think the conflict will be resolved with Russia and Ukraine until Ukraine gets out of — until Putin gets out of Ukraine.

Anyway, you guys, I’m heading down to — first of all, going to Cairo for the – for the environmental effort, then heading over to Colombia and then — I mean, Cambodia. I was thinking — I’m thinking the Western Hemisphere. And then off to Indonesia. So there will be a lot to talk about.

A lot of talk—but how much of it will be understood?

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In Other News

One-Armed Bandits Ruled Out as Suspects
“Austin police searching for man involved in 2 armed bank robberies,” KTBC-TV, November 9

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Daniel Mullen.)