Biden and the elephant in the mousehole

The hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s enemies is amazing, says Rich Lowry. They’re always banging on about the threat he poses to the rule of law, yet they have no problem with Joe Biden subverting the constitutional order. The president has just announced a new attempt to force through a $475bn student-debt forgiveness plan, without congressional authorisation or justification in the law. The supreme court blocked his previous attempt last year, saying the president “can’t unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy”. But Biden is determined to get his way. After “scrounging around” the statute books for loopholes, he claims to have found the authority to forgive the loans, and is set on smuggling in the change through the small print of the Higher Education Act. This is an act of “pure executive wilfulness”. It’s a fundamental legal principle that you can’t, as the supreme court once put it, find elephants in mouseholes. It’s wrong, in other words, to change regulatory schemes in hugely consequential ways, on the strength of some vague ancillary clause. Yet this is what Biden intends to do – and his backers are cheering him on. “For the progressives, becoming sticklers about the process and the law will have to wait until Trump is president again.”