By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Paul Waldman has penned an utterly execrable piece in today’s Washington
Post, in which he attempts with a straight face to argue that the bad
actors in the student-loan “forgiveness” litigation are . . . the
people who are trying to uphold the rule of law. “It took a month,” Waldman
writes,
but the inevitable has happened.
Conservatives have filed a lawsuit asking the courts to nullify the Biden
administration’s decision to forgive up to $10,000 in student loans (and
$20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants for low-income borrowers) for the tens of
millions of Americans burdened by education debt.
Why, one must ask, was this suit “inevitable”? Was it
because the Biden administration is in flagrant violation of the law, and
because everyone in America knows it?
Not in Waldman’s view, apparently. Rather, he insists
that
this is a story about Republicans
trying once again to achieve policy victories they can’t obtain by winning
votes.
This is dishonesty so brazen, so profound, so nihilistic,
that it’s almost impossible to know where to begin. Nobody in Washington
believes that Biden has the authority to do this — not even Biden himself. And,
clearly, Waldman doesn’t believe it either, because, as is typical of those who
have decided to back Biden’s play, he at no point makes any attempt to argue
that the move was constitutionally sound.
“The most significant obstacle conservatives faced,”
Waldman writes, “was finding a plaintiff with ‘standing’ to sue.” Which, of
course, is true. And why is that true? Because, other than the standing
question, there are no other obstacles to the order being struck down. The
statutory case is nonexistent. The emergency being used to invoke that
nonexistent statutory case is nonexistent. And, last time I checked, Article I
still vested all legislative powers “in a Congress of the United States, which
shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
Since Biden made his “decision” — that’s a euphemism for
“willfully violated his oath of office” — “you don’t have standing!” has become
his apologists’ only rhetorical refuge. Really, it’s more of a taunt than
a legal argument — which is made clear by Waldman’s decision to mention it in
passing, and then to move immediately to making a policy argument for the move,
to throwing stones at Republicans for being Republicans, and to complaining
farcically about “the billionaire Koch brothers.”
As if to underscore that he’s talking nonsense, Waldman
claims:
Republicans can now be relied on to
challenge in court almost every important law passed by a Democratic Congress
or policy enacted by a Democratic administration.
No, they can’t. No lawsuit has resulted from the $2
trillion American Recovery Plan. No lawsuit has resulted from the bipartisan
infrastructure bill. No lawsuit has resulted from the so-called Inflation
Reduction Act. There were lawsuits against Biden’s executive
order extending the federal eviction moratorium, and against Biden’s executive
order demanding a federal vaccine mandate, and the reason for that is not that
they were “Democratic,” but that they were illegal — and in precisely the same
way as is Biden’s order on student loans. If Paul Waldman is unable to grasp
the difference, I would encourage him to watch
this explainer.
Concluding his piece, Waldman writes:
Let’s not lose sight of what the
court case is about: a party that has lost none of its passion for the
interests of the wealthy, nurturing the grievances of the working class and
pretending there is no contradiction between the two.
No, it’s about none of those things. It’s about the
integrity of the United States Constitution, which does not permit the
executive branch to spend hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional
approval. There is, indeed, a party in this story that is “trying once again to
achieve policy victories they can’t obtain by winning votes,” but it’s not the
opponents of Biden’s illegal order; it’s President Biden himself, who, unable
to win the votes for his idea in Congress, has decided simply to bypass the law
— and who must be thrilled to the gills that so many self-professed journalists
have chosen to forget all they once said about the importance of the rule of
law and elected instead to toady up to him.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” indeed.
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