Biden is not a king — if he wants to pay student loans, he needs Congress


The president of america just isn’t a king. Joe Biden appears to have forgotten that.

We used to show our children that the Structure separates powers between Congress, which makes the legal guidelines, and the president, who carries them out.

The courts are there to resolve disputes over what the legal guidelines imply. The Founding Fathers designed this technique, as John Adams wrote within the Massachusetts structure of 1780, “to the top it might be a authorities of legal guidelines, and never of males.”

Presidents can provide orders to the individuals who work for them within the govt department, however they aren’t speculated to make legal guidelines. Our presidents have been forgetting this lately.

Whereas the issue is bipartisan, the presidencies of Biden and Barack Obama have been the worst offenders in utilizing presidential govt orders and administrative company rules to jot down new legal guidelines.

Simply counting govt orders — Biden has issued 79 of them up to now — doesn’t actually seize the issue. There may be nothing unsuitable with govt orders that designate presidential insurance policies so the chief department can observe them. And a number of the worst mischief comes from orders issued by the alphabet soup of regulatory companies and cupboard departments.


Supreme Court
Scholar mortgage debtors and advocates collect for the folks’s rally to cancel scholar debt throughout the Supreme Courtroom hearings on scholar debt aid on Feb. 28, 2023.
Getty Photographs for Individuals’s Rally to Cancel Scholar Debt

The actual downside is when presidential administrations attempt to make sweeping new guidelines on problems with home politics that should be determined by the lawmakers.

So, when Congress wouldn’t go Obama’s proposals to offer authorized standing to unlawful immigrants, he simply ordered them himself. “I’ve a pen and a telephone,” he mentioned, as if this made him the entire authorities. He did the identical with an formidable plan to jot down new environmental emissions guidelines.

When Congress wouldn’t fund Donald Trump’s border wall, he declared a state of emergency and tried to bankroll it himself from cash the chief department had for different functions.

Biden has put each of his predecessors to disgrace. Along with his personal barrage of environmental and social coverage orders, Biden has used the COVID pandemic to assert “emergency” powers with out precedent in American historical past.

The Supreme Courtroom already blocked him from utilizing office security legal guidelines as an excuse to create a nationwide vaccine mandate by the Occupational Security and Well being Administration and — much more ridiculously — a nationwide tenant-eviction moratorium by the Facilities for Illness Management.

Congress by no means made the CDC the nation’s landlord, and even Biden admitted he was simply shopping for time till the Courtroom may hear the case and cease him.

On Tuesday, the Courtroom heard challenges to Biden’s try and spend half a trillion {dollars} cancelling the school and graduate faculty money owed of 43 million folks.

With whose cash? The nationwide debt, after all, as a result of Congress didn’t applicable funds for this or elevate taxes or charges to pay for it.

Biden claims to be utilizing the emergency powers of the HEROES Act handed after 9/11, the aim of which was to let presidents droop some scholar mortgage guidelines for troopers serving overseas.

Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s personal Division of Schooling warned him that he didn’t have the ability to do that.


Advocates for student debt cancellation rally
Advocates for scholar debt cancellation rally outdoors the Supreme Courtroom in Washington, DC on Feb. 28, 2023.
Alejandro Alvarez/Sipa USA

The Founders understood that probably the most harmful energy of all was when kings may rule with out having to ask for cash. The English “Superb Revolution” of 1688-89 put an finish to British kings making an attempt to rule with out calling Parliament to boost cash.

James II was overthrown by males anxious that he’d get the cash elsewhere by promoting out the nation to overseas lenders — which on the time meant King Louis XIV of France.

The French kings dominated with out their legislature till 1789; once they lastly obtained so deep in debt that they wanted to summon it, they ended up with the French Revolution.

Otto von Bismarck constructed the German Empire by proving that the Prussian king may go to struggle with out elevating funds by Prussia’s parliament; that set a precedent that left no limits on the Kaiser till he provoked a world struggle.

The Structure is meant to stop that taking place right here, as a result of it offers Congress the ability of the purse. Biden is neither a king nor a Kaiser. If needs half a trillion {dollars}, he ought to ask Congress.