Marc Thiessen: Biden doesn't have the right to circumvent the Supreme Court
Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen discusses the Biden administration's plan to work around the Supreme Court's ruling on student loan forgiveness and Charles Barkley's $5 million donation to ensure diversity at Auburn University.
The United States Supreme Court finally squashed the Biden administration’s plan to redistribute roughly half a trillion dollars in student loan debt. Had they allowed it to move forward, millions of families who made personal sacrifices to avoid crushing debt would have been forced to foot the bill for yet another Democrat handout. Earlier this year I led an amicus brief with forty-two of my Senate colleagues urging the Court to reject Biden’s lawless scheme. I am pleased to see the Supreme Court sided with us, and with the millions of Americans who demanded we put a stop to this latest, shameless power grab.
Considering the dire state of his approval ratings, it’s no surprise that Biden tried to buy his way out of the problems his administration has created. But that’s not the American dream—that’s the socialist dream, and I am glad the Supreme Court rejected it. The decision represents a major victory not only for the American taxpayer, but for the rule of law.
Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative powers in Congress. Our Founders recognized that no part of this legislative power is more important—or more effective—than the power of the purse. And as most high school civics students understand, the power to spend money and forgive debts rests with Congress alone. But the Biden administration, through its unilateral decision to erase debt owed to the United States, seized an alarming and unprecedented degree of Congress’s constitutional authority. As we argued in our brief, "where the President has failed in his duty to faithfully execute the law, it is the province and duty of the Court to remind him of that obligation." In rejecting President Biden’s executive action, the Supreme Court did exactly that.
But the Court’s opinion is important for reasons beyond its defense of the separation of powers. The American higher education system is in shambles, and decades of federal meddling are directly to blame. The Court’s decision today was a step in the right direction, but more action is needed to reign in a higher education system that has become largely unaccountable to those it purports to serve.
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In recent decades, the cost of higher education has ballooned, increasing by some 180 percent. Whereas the average annual tuition to attend a four-year college, adjusted for inflation, was $10,231 in 1980, today’s students pay $28,775 for the same privilege. But can we honestly say that today’s students are better educated than students in 1980? Or that the value of their degrees is worth the ever-increasing price tag? Of course not.
Most Americans could not justify spending a hundred thousand dollars of their own money on a degree in anything, much less a certification in gender studies. The far-left degree programs hawked by activist professors by and large do not provide students with marketable skills upon graduation. But easy federal money changes that calculus. Students are pressured into taking out massive loans to pursue an education that fails to prepare them for the working world.
Colleges, of course, are happy participants in the scheme. Institutions of higher learning gorge themselves on taxpayer money at the federal trough. Under our current system, an hourly wage earner in rural Tennessee is forced to subsidize a dean of Diversity Equity and Inclusion earning six figures. Well-paid administrators have rapidly multiplied on university campuses over the last two decades, with some elite colleges employing more administrators than academic faculty—and others, more administrators than students.
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A general view of the U.S. Supreme Court, Friday, June 23, 2023, in Washington. ((AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Do we really want taxpayers bankrolling a system where elite universities, which already boast multi-billion-dollar endowments, charge American students over $50,000 a year to prop up bureaucrats who add questionable value to their degrees? Indeed, considering the leftist dogma being pushed on many of these college campuses, these administrators often detract from our students’ educations. This is the system our federal government has created, and it is fundamentally unjust.
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Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan would only have exacerbated this problem, benefitting our nation’s highest earners at the expense of those who paid off their loans or chose to forgo college altogether. Roughly 210 million Americans do not have student loan debt. Why should these Americans, many of whom did not attend college, pay the bills of wealthy graduates with advanced degrees?
Congress needs to address exploding college tuition and the rise of low-value degrees. But in the meantime, the Supreme Court has stopped the Biden administration from making the problem worse. This is a win for all Americans who care about the rule of law and their pocketbooks.