I feel obligated to note that President Biden has extended the “pause” on student loan repayments pending resolution of the administration’s petition to the Supreme Court for relief allowing implementation of its lawless loan forgiveness plan. The “pause” reminds me of the title of Arlo Guthrie’s “The Pause of Mr. Claus” and it’s certainly in the spirit of the song.
We have learned the government’s multifarious uses of “emergency” the hard way. We don’t need any reminders, but they persist in administering them good and hard. We can be sure there are more to come.
“I’m completely confident my plan is legal,” Biden said in a video on Tuesday announcing the student loan repayment pause. Duly noted, but the claim of legality is ill-founded. It is a bad joke. That’s one reason why they have scrambled to revise the contours of the program to strip potential plaintiffs of standing.
In the windmills of his mind, Biden’s claim of certainty may be true. The claim of legality deserves to be ranked up there with Biden’s claims that he had finished in the top half of his law school class, that he had attended law school on a full academic scholarship, that he had been named the outstanding student in the political science department as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, and that he had graduated from Delaware with three undergraduate degrees.
I'm confident that our student debt relief plan is legal. But it’s on hold because Republican officials want to block it.
That's why @SecCardona is extending the payment pause to no later than June 30, 2023, giving the Supreme Court time to hear the case in its current term. pic.twitter.com/873CurlHFZ
— President Biden (@POTUS) November 22, 2022
NOTE: The “pause” reads as follows: “The student loan payment pause is extended until the U.S. Department of Education is permitted to implement the debt relief program or the litigation is resolved. Payments will restart 60 days later. If the debt relief program has not been implemented and the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, 2023 — payments will resume 60 days after that. We will notify borrowers before payments restart.”
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