The Patriot Post® · Biden's Bullheaded Student Loan Debt Gambit

Perhaps no action taken by Joe Biden has been more radical and anti-American — not to mention more nakedly political — that his student loan forgiveness gambit.

Biden himself knew this action was radical when he distanced himself from it back during his 2020 presidential campaign. Recall that at the time, Senator Bernie Sanders was plugging “free college” as part of his own radical socialist vision.

According to The Washington Post, Biden “worried that voters who’d never gone to college could resent a move to cancel huge amounts of student debt [and] that the federal government should not be bailing out Ivy League graduates.” Clearly, he didn’t stay worried. Two years into his term — tellingly, during the 2022 midterms — Biden had a change of heart.

Not only did Biden jump fully on board the debt cancellation boondoggle, but he’s never looked back — even after being rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer, when the justices blocked his student loan bribe.

Following the High Court’s ruling, Biden could have simply admitted that his initial misgivings were correct and moved on. He could have even publicly railed against the decision, voicing his disagreement, and then using it as political fodder to pressure Congress into passing some form of debt cancellation legislation.

But he didn’t. Instead, the bullheaded Biden doubled down. “I will stop at nothing,” he said, “to find other ways to deliver relief.” Well, at least he wasn’t lying.

Since then, the Biden administration has been twisting and expanding all kinds of laws, finding heretofore unseen means for justifying the transfer of billions of dollars in student loan debt onto taxpayers. And the courts have repeatedly stepped in and blocked some of these actions. The latest example is the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals blocking Biden’s Savings on Valuable Education Plan from going into effect after seven Republican-led states sued to stop the $500 million scheme.

Meanwhile, on the same day that the Eighth Circuit blocked Biden, his administration trotted out another scheme totaling $1.2 billion in debt relief for some 35,000 student borrowers. This latest plan expands the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and was designed to provide relief for those in public service careers such as teachers, nurses, firefighters, and others. The Biden administration expanded the 2007 law to make it retroactive, allowing borrowers to receive credit for required payments. But the law wasn’t designed to allow loan forgiveness, and that’s exactly how the Biden administration is now using it.

So, why has Biden continued engaging in this blatantly unconstitutional action? The only logical explanation is politics. He’s doing it for the votes. Indeed, data shows that women hold more college debt than men, and the reason has to do with the difference in the choice of majors. Men tend to choose majors in higher-paying fields, whereas women tend to choose majors in lower-paying fields. There is nothing wrong with this; however, the result is that men tend toward paying off their college debt faster than women.

The Biden administration sees this, and thus this student debt gambit is merely a bribe directed toward the Democrats’ largest voting demographic: women.