Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a challenge to Joe Biden’s brazenly illegal student loan forgiveness vote-buying scheme, in an unexpected victory for the president just weeks before the midterm elections.
Barrett did not give an explanation for the decision, which came on the same day that a federal judge dismissed another challenge to Biden’s program.
Supreme Court defends Biden student loan policy
Starting this Sunday, Biden will begin unilaterally forgiving up to $20,000 in student loans, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
Biden’s plan plainly usurps Congress’s power of the purse and unfairly burdens people who didn’t go to college with subsidizing a handout that they won’t receive.
But challengers have had difficulty establishing “standing” to bring their case, meaning they can show they are being harmed in a specific way.
The same day that Barrett turned away a lawsuit from the Brown County Taxpayers Association, a federal judge dismissed a challenge from six Republican states, citing the standing issue.
U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey in St. Louis wrote that the challengers “present important and significant challenges to the debt relief plan,” but they weren’t able to explain how Biden’s plan harmed them.
“Blatantly unconstitutional”
After the Supreme Court’s rejection, the Brown County Taxpayers Association criticized the theory that, without standing to sue, Biden is permitted to do something illegal with de facto impunity.
“It simply cannot be the answer that no one can sue to stop such a blatantly unconstitutional program,” they wrote in a piece for National Review.
As a flimsy pretext for his power grab, Biden has cited the COVID pandemic as an “emergency” using an extraordinarily broad interpretation of a 2003 law, the HEROES Act, which was enacted after 9/11 to help veterans.
Earlier this week, Biden said he would “never apologize” for buying votes with other people’s money.
“I will never apologize for helping working Americans and middle-class people as they recover from the pandemic,” Biden said.