The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked President Joe Biden’s student loan “forgiveness” plan nationwide on Monday, putting a halt to the program that would force taxpayers to pay for others’ student debt. But Democrats already used the vote-buying scheme to sway young Americans’ votes last week, and now they’re blaming the plan’s blatant unconstitutionality on Republicans.
The federal court’s injunction deemed that the loan bailout “presents a threatened financial harm” to the states that sued the Biden administration over it, enough to temporarily bar the program from implementation. The injunction follows a separate decision by a U.S. District Court in Texas last week, which found that the HEROES Act of 2003 — a post-9/11 law that the Biden administration cited in its attempt to legally justify the program — “does not provide the executive branch clear congressional authorization to create a $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.”
The injunction will stay “until further order” from the Eighth Circuit Court or the U.S. Supreme Court,” the court said.
This puts a temporary halt to Biden’s student loan bailout plan announced in August. The program planned to “forgive” up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt ($20,000 for Pell Grant recipients) — a euphemism for dumping the bill for hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt onto taxpayers.
Despite knowing this illegal program would likely be stopped in its tracks by the courts, since a president does not have the authority to unilaterally issue a loan forgiveness program, the Biden administration made its announcement just before a major midterm election, apparently hoping to appeal to many young voters who thought they would have part of their student debt “canceled.”
Exit polling data for the 2022 midterm election suggests 63 percent of voters aged 18-29 cast ballots for Democrats. At the same time, 1 in 5 Democrats said in a recent survey that they would only support Biden in 2024 if he “canceled” student debt.
Now that the judicial system has inevitably highlighted the unconstitutionality of the program, however, Democrat politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren have seized the opportunity to blame Republicans. The Massachusetts senator falsely claimed in a tweet that Biden does have the legal authority to cancel student debt, while simultaneously shifting attention to Republicans, saying they need to “get out of the way so Americans can get this much-needed relief.”
Others did not even bother denying that Biden’s student loan ploy functioned as a way to turn more young voters away from Republicans.
