Bandit in the White House

Joe Biden is a lawless president. He’d be right at home in a Western movie, hiding out with the Hole-inthe-wall Gang or muttering about stinkin’ badges.

Biden is trying again, for the third time, to declare that federal student loan debt is forgiven.

“The plan could help rally support among young voters,” the New York Times reported.

Giving away money in exchange for votes is not legal, and neither is forgiving federal student loan debt without authorization from Congress. But in 2020, Biden campaigned for president on a promise that he would do it anyway.

Everyone who has ever taken a high school government class knows that spending bills must start in the House of Representatives, then be passed by the Senate and signed by the president. That’s how the spending of your tax dollars is authorized.

Federal student loan forgiveness is a spending program. It spends money that’s owed to the taxpayers, crediting it to

people who took out loans for their education. Up until Joe Biden became president, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the president does not have the unilateral authority to cancel federal student loan debt.

The U.S. Supreme Court explained that to the president last year, throwing out the plan Biden had hatched in the summer of 2022 in time to buy votes in the midterm elections.

That plan would have forgiven an astounding $400 billion

in student debt by distorting the HEROES Act, a law that allowed the government to waive student debt during a national emergency. The HEROES Act was passed to help people who were joining the military after the 9/11 attacks.

Biden tried to make it apply to more than 40 million borrowers by arguing that COVID was still a national emergency. The plan was challenged, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled that Biden had exceeded his authority.

Did that stop the Bumbledance Kid or his pals at the Hole-in-the-wall hideout? Of course not. What kind of a movie would that be?

“I will stop at nothing,” the president said in a statement after the Supreme Court struck down his plan.

There, that’s a better movie. Terrible government, but a better movie.

In the next scene, Biden expanded a loan repayment program Congress had created in the 1990s. The program authorized income-based loan payments and forgave loans after 20 or 25 years. Biden changed it to 10 years. It affected about 150,000 voters sorry, student borrowers who had taken out loans of $12,000 or less.

Clearly that wasn’t enough to win the West, because in February, Biden announced during a local campaign stop in Culver City that he was speeding up the loan cancellations by six months. And in early April, the president announced a much bigger program of student loan forgiveness while campaigning in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where an Emerson College poll in mid-march showed him

ANDREW HARNIK — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 7in Washington.

SUSAN WALSH — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS President Joe Biden speaks about the student debt portal beta test in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in 2022.