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Student loan forgiveness is vote-buying

July 30, 2024

Lost in all the noise following the assassination attempt against former President Donald was confirmation of what many sensible Americans already understood: President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief schemes have been purely political.

On July 15, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona sent an official letter to student loan borrowers lamenting recent court rulings blocking the Biden administration’s policies on student loans.

“Let me be clear: President Biden and I are determined to lower costs for student loan borrowers, to make repaying student debt affordable and realistic, and to build on our separate efforts that have already provided relief to 4.75 million Americans — no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us,” Cardona wrote in the bluntly partisan letter.

Cardona continued, “While we disagree with the Republican elected officials’ efforts here to side with special interests and block borrowers from getting breathing room on their student loans, President Biden and our Administration will not stop fighting to make sure Americans have affordable access to the lifechanging opportunities a higher education can provide.”

The message is a peculiar one. Beyond the partisanship, the notion that “special interests” are behind the successful legal challenges to the Biden administration’s overreaching efforts to forgive student loan debt is a strange one.

As Frederick Hess and Michael Brickman of the American Enterprise Institute put well: “Those ‘special interests’ that Republicans are ‘siding with’? They’re the 90 percent of Americans who don’t owe student debt but whom Cardona is hoping to stick with the tab. Those awful court rulings? They were issued by judges who were appointed by President Obama, back when Joe Biden was Vice President.”

To the latter point, two Obama-nominated judges — one in Kansas and one in Missouri — indeed blocked one of Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan. Upholding the law, after all, shouldn’t be a partisan exercise.

It would be one thing if this letter from Cardona was a typical, overwrought campaign message. But, no, this was the official messaging from a Cabinet official tasked with overseeing and implementing federal policy.

For that reason, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach are among those accusing Cardona of violating the federal Hatch Act, which requires that “federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion.”

Setting aside whether Cardona is in fact guilty of violating the law by engaging in naked partisan messaging under the guise of his official capacity, the incident is a reminder that, yes, the Biden administration sees student loan relief through a strictly political lens.

That approach to federal policymaking lends itself to sloppy decision-making. If the goal is to provide sweeping relief to the millions of Americans with student loan debts, that should be done through Congress.

Unfortunately, President Biden — and he is still the president — has consistently chosen to sidestep the appropriate channels on this issue.

Whoever is the next president of the United States should brush up on the Constitution and learn how to do things correctly.

Orange County Register

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Student loan forgiveness is vote-buying

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