President Biden knew the moment he announced student debt forgiveness in August the it was unconstitutional and would never pass the judicial smell test. But he did it anyway in hopes of increasing the youth vote to prop up struggling Democratic campaigns.
And it worked.
Whenever anyone brought up student debt forgiveness, Biden had repeatedly said that he couldn’t do it on his own — it could only be done through Congress, which holds the pursestrings. And legal scholars agreed with that assessment.
After the president announced his program to offer up to $20,000 in debt forgiveness to student borrowers, professor Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert, saw nothing but problems ahead.
The founders “saw the president as having limited powers limited by Article 2 of the Constitution [saying that] legislation, particularly involving money should come from the House of Representatives and the Senate," Dershowitz told Newsmax TV on “America Right Now.”
And he believed it would generate nothing but litigation — primarily from those who had paid off their student loans.
"There will be lawsuits by people who paid their loans back saying, 'Wait a minute. We were good guys. We've paid our loans back. Give us the equivalent of what you're giving the other people,’" Dershowitz added.
Although Biden spoke of the possibility of student debt forgiveness during his 2020 presidential campaign, for the first year-and-a-half in office he said that only an act of Congress could do it.
It wasn’t until early fall that he switched gears and announced the plan, which would come with a $400 billion to $1 trillion price tag.
At that time it looked as though Democrats were in real trouble, what with escalating crime, crippling inflation, insane fuel costs, and a nonexistent border, to mention but a few.
Yet instead of addressing these concerns the White House and Congress seemed to devote their efforts on LGBT rights, climate change, getting Trump, and painting concerned parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.”
Analysts and pollsters were predicting not just a red wave, but a red tsunami, one of them former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who predicted “this may be the biggest Republican election since 1920.”
That was in October. Just days prior to the election Gingrich predicted that Republicans could flip four U.S. Senate seats and as many as 70 House seats.
So Biden threw a Hail Mary in the form of his student debt forgiveness, hoping against hope to bring in that age group that has had historically shown low voter turnout — the youth vote. And they answered the call.
The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts (CIRCLE) indicated that young Americans ages 18-29 overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates.
Timing, as they say, is everything. And as luck would have it the courts didn’t begin shutting down the the Biden loan forgiveness program until after the election,
It was yet another indication that Biden “is easiest the luckiest” politician in U.S. history, according to conservative political commentator Dan Bongino.
But people began smelling a rat, chief among them Briahna Joy Gray, whose claim to fame was as national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run.
“They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out — knowing it wasn't going anywhere bc they relied on faulty legal authority,” she tweeted.
“Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn't do this intentionally,” Gray added.
But they should have listened instead to Biden’s 18 months of repeated claims that the president lacked the authority to forgive student debt.
And maybe they should also have listened to then-Sen. Kamala Harris during the 2020 campaign.
“What else do we know about this population, 18 through 24?” she asked. “They are stupid!” she answered. “They make really bad decisions.”
So it was all a con job from the start. Young voters fell for it, experienced analysts discounted it, and Biden’s Irish luck held.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.