PrairiePundit

   Red State: As the nation was captivated by a total eclipse of the sun on Monday, Joe Biden suffered a total eclipse of his shame in Wisconsin. After spending an unfathomable amount of taxpayer money to fly to the battleground state on Air Force One, the president proceeded to bumble and lie his way through a mercifully short speech. In it, he bragged about defying the Supreme Court on student loan forgiveness and introduced a new falsehood about his childhood, the latter being so easily debunkable that I can only assume he's not even trying anymore. Let's kick things off with the following admission, though. That was probably the most honest thing he said at the event. Recently, Jill Biden demanded behind the scenes that her husband "stop it, stop it now" regarding Israel's war on Hamas. A day later, the president was on the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu telling him he must agree to a ceasefire. Biden getting "instructions from his wife" is probably ...

 Federalist: Biden’s Latest Student Loan Bailout Has Election-Year Bribe Written All Over It The Democrat’s election-year bribe would be paid for by taxpayers forced to shoulder an ever-expanding national debt. Student loans have become a way for colleges and universities to increase prices. 

 Washington Examiner: A fresh lawsuit revives an old challenge for President  Joe Biden  — delivering on his 2020 campaign pledge to forgive  student loans . Biden announced in 2022 that he’d “cancel” $10,000 of federal student debt per borrower, only to see his plan ruled illegal by the  Supreme Court . He has since announced another $144 billion in student debt writeoffs and created a program to lower future payments, but he was slapped with a new lawsuit by a coalition of Republican-led states on Thursday. “Last time defendants tried this the Supreme Court said that this action was illegal,” a  portion of the suit  from Kansas and 10 other states said. “Nothing since then has changed, other than introducing more legal errors into this rule’s underlying analysis.” Missouri has promised to deliver a second suit making similar arguments next week, creating the possibility that Biden will once again face a political setback on student loans that could d...

  Washington Examiner: The Supreme Court put a roadblock in front of President Joe Biden 's student loan forgiveness plans, but it has not stopped them. Biden announced a massive student debt transfer totaling at least $400 billion in August 2022, only to see it struck down by the high court in June 2023. But since then, it has been full steam ahead for the Biden administration and its Education Department, with so many student debt actions taken over the last six months that it's hard even for experts to keep up with it all. While the moves generate excitement and hope for the roughly 40 million people with student debt, they have upset people concerned that the unpaid debt falls on the backs of taxpayers, not to mention the less-than-sound financial advice implied at the individual level. "If you take out a loan, you pay it back," Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) was fond of saying during his now-suspended presidential campaign. Here are three times Biden forgave student ...

 Charles C.W. Cooke: Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases of Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown. The long-term stakes could not be higher. The proximate question in those cases is whether the president of the United States is permitted to use the 2003 HEROES Act to forgive up to a trillion dollars in student loans without congressional approval. The real question at hand is whether the executive branch will be allowed to transmute a brazen, flagrant, cynical lie into a politically motivated spending binge that eats up 4 percent of America’s GDP, and thereby to signal that the limits on presidential power within the U.S. Constitution are functionally dead. ... There is much more. I suspect the conservative majority on the court is also skeptical that Biden can do what he is trying.  As college became more expensive student debt has increased at a rate beyond many people's ability to afford it even with loans.  Something should be...

 National Review: Authors of the Law Biden Used to Wipe Out Student Debt Declare He Doesn’t Have the Authority  The legislators who wrote the HEROES Act, the law that the Biden administration claims gives it broad authority to forgive student loans, have filed a brief with the Supreme Court — declaring in unmistakable terms that the act does not, in fact, give the Biden administration broad authority to forgive student loans. ... There is much more.  This looks like another example of Biden making stuff up to give away money owed to the government. 

 Dan Bongino: OOPS: Biden Education Department Incorrectly Told 9 Million Borrowers They Were Approved for Student Debt Bailout  The Department of Education is now sending correction emails after incorrectly telling nine million applicants that they had been approved for Joe Biden’s student debt bailout, which is now held up in the courts. ... We have come to expect such blunders from the Biden administration.   He should never have been elected and probably would not have been if Democrats had not rigged the 2020 election. 

  Soxaholic @MikeBrennan330 · 23h Replying to @mkhammer Sen. Warren on POTUS right to spend tax revenues: 2020 Border Wall: POTUS has no right to build border wall w/o Cong approval ($8-12B) & leads effort to divert already appropriated funds 2022: POTUS has unlimited right to cancel student loans ($400B) w/o Cong. approval I think she has already lost this argument, but may not know it.

 Red States: ... Biden spoke on Monday about the  student debt relief portal beta test  that they conducted over the weekend for people who were applying for the bailout. Biden also attacked Republicans. Now, let’s talk about who is against helping millions of hardworking middle-class Americans. Republican members of Congress and Republican governors are trying to do everything they can to deny this relief, even to their own constituents. As soon as I announced my administration’s student debt plan, they started attacking it, saying all kinds of things. Their outrage is wrong and it’s hypocritical. I will never apologize for helping working Americans and middle-class people as they recover from the pandemic, especially not the same Republicans who voted for a $2 trillion tax cut in the last administration — mainly benefitting the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations — and didn’t pay for a penny of it and racked up a deficit. I don’t want to hear from Republic...

 Conservative Brief: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went extreme in a screed against Republicans who oppose President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. ... After Schumer’s speech, Arizona GOP Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit against the president’s student loan forgiveness program. It came after other states, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina, filed their own lawsuits, The Daily Wire reported . “The president’s action is contrary to several recent United States Supreme Court decisions striking down federal agencies’ assertion of power never granted to them by Congress,” the attorney general said. “Despite being told by members of congress he cannot pursue such an action, Biden is relying on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act (HEROES Act) and the COVID-19 pandemic. The HEROES Act was a response to the September 11th attacks to relieve active-duty personnel from financial hardship while defending our...

 National Review: States Sue to Stop Biden Loan ‘Forgiveness’ Program: ‘Unwise,’ ‘Unfair,’ and ‘Unlawful’ Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and South Carolina joined together to file a lawsuit against the Biden administration on Thursday in an attempt to stop the president’s announced student loan-forgiveness program from taking effect. “In addition to being economically unwise and downright unfair, the Biden Administration’s Mass Debt Cancellation is yet another example in a long line of unlawful regulatory actions,” argued the plaintiffs in their filing . The administration has said that it will wipe out up to $10,000 in loans for borrowers making under $125,000 per year, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients who meet that criteria. Married persons filing jointly will be able to take advantage of the new benefit if their income does not exceed $250,000. While President Biden has styled the program as a “targeted” effort to help “families who need it the most — wor...

 Washington Examiner: President Joe Biden 's plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt is facing its first serious legal challenge alleging it violates federal law and the Constitution, according to a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation on Tuesday. The PLF, a libertarian law firm, is asking a judge in the District Court for the Southern District of Indiana to place a temporary restraining order on the Biden administration's plan, which seeks to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt per person for more than 40 million borrowers. The law group claims to have identified a group of taxpayers who will be unfairly harmed by the loan forgiveness plan, including one named Frank Garrison, an employee of PLF and a resident of Indiana, which is one of at least six states that tax this type of debt cancellation as income. BIDEN STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS WILL COST $400 BILLION OVER 10 YEARS, CBO ESTIMATES Garrison is already part of the congression...

 Washington Examiner: Democrats divided on Biden’s student loan forgiveness With Republicans all opposed to the plan and Democrats split on it there is no majority support.  I suspect the program is likely to be challenged in the courts too.  I think working-class voters and graduates who have already paid off their loans are also going to be opposing this.   See, also: DeSantis: Biden Student Loan Forgiveness a Policy and Political ‘Disaster’

 Red States: ... For those who missed it, an August 23rd memo written by Dept. of Ed. General Counsel Lisa Brown stated that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has the legal authority to force taxpayers to pay for the student loan debts of others thanks to the 2003 HEROES Act, which is a reversal of a January 2021 DOE memo which stated that they didn’t have such authority. “The HEROES Act, first enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, provides the Secretary broad authority to grant relief from student loan requirements during specific periods (a war, other military operation, or national emergency, such as the present COVID-19 pandemic) and for specific purposes (including to address the financial harms of such a war, other military operation, or emergency),” the memo read. This dubious justification caught the attention of Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, who asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during the Thursday press briefing how they could ci...

 Washington Examiner: President Joe Biden’s student loan bailout is illegal, inflationary, and immoral, all at the same time. It is also divisive. Nothing separates people more today than the line between those who have and have not gone to college . By giving away as much as $40,000 to families privileged with a college education, Biden is benefiting those most fortunate among us at the expense of those least fortunate, making existing inequalities even worse. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 empowers the secretary of education to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to” student loans so that borrowers are not adversely affected by any presidentially declared national emergency. The intent of the legislation was to provide relief for student borrowers in the military who were called into duty due to a national emergency. President Donald Trump used this authority to suspend student loan payments after he declared COV...