Texas judge nixes Biden student loan bailout scheme
On Thursday night, a Federal judge in Texas struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, calling it “one of the most egregious executive overreaches in presidential history.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump who is based in Fort Worth, made the decision in a case brought by two private borrowers with support from a small business group called Job Creators Network, a conservative advocacy group founded by Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot.
Pittman wrote that the plan must be vacated as the president does not have the authority to forgive student loan debt through executive action, and that Biden’s plan violated the separation of powers as called for in the Constitution If allowed to proceed, the plan would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
Biden’s plan had already been temporarily blocked by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at the request of six Republican-led states to enjoin it while they appealed the dismissal of their own lawsuit. The two borrowers sued after they were determined to be ineligible for the loan forgiveness plan, arguing that it did not follow proper rulemaking processes and was thus unlawful.
“Whether the program constitutes good public policy is not the role of this court to determine,” Pittman wrote. “Still, 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,” Pittman continued. “Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government,” he wrote. “It is fundamental to the survival of our Republic that the separation of powers as outlined in our Constitution be preserved.”
The president of Job Creators Network, Alfredo Ortiz, hailed the decision.
“This attempted illegal student loan bailout would have done nothing to address the root cause of unaffordable tuition: greedy and bloated colleges that raise tuition far more than inflation year after year while sitting on $700 billion in endowments,” Ortiz said.
