The U.S. Court of Appeals just averted a constitutional crisis — Democrats should be relieved.
That it came from blocking yet another attempt by former President Joe Biden to shift billions in debt from college students to the general taxpayer should make no difference to those with such acute constitutional concerns. Right?
On Feb. 18, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Biden’s Education Department had exceeded its authority in attempting to shift college debt on a scale similar to that provided by Biden’s initial 2022 massive college debt shift. In 2023, the Supreme Court had ruled against Biden’s effort to permanently cancel up to $430 billion in loan debt for as many as 43 million borrowers under the HEROES Act.
Undeterred, Biden sought multiple times to stretch other laws to shift college debt. By the time he left the White House, he was trying to cancel $184 billion in debt owed to taxpayers by approximately 5 million borrowers.
So to recap, there was a definitive Supreme Court ruling followed by repeated attempts by a president to circumvent it. The judicial branch determined and the executive branch ignored it. Were the Biden-Harris administration still in office, there’s no reason to believe — based on repeated prior attempts — that the executive branch would not still be ignoring the judicial branch.
If ever there were the makings of constitutional crisis, this would seem to have it.
For weeks, Democrats have been echoing the mantra of “constitutional crisis” over the Trump administration’s DOGE efforts to cut spending, personnel, and regulations. However, there is no Democrat roar of approval here. In fact, the silence is deafening.
Democrats could also be cheering the avoidance of fiscal and economic crises with the appeals court ruling. Biden’s debt shift from college borrowers to general taxpayers would have meant adding billions more to a burgeoning budget deficit.
And had that debt been shifted, it would have amounted to a windfall to borrowers who assuredly would have spent some or all it, further adding to price pressures that have been sizzling since Biden took office in 2021.
Strangely, Democrats are not cheering the avoiding of these crises, either.
When Biden first announced his mammoth college debt shift, Democrats cheered.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called it “one of the biggest acts of consumer debt relief in American history.” In April 2024, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) applauded Biden’s attempts to circumvent the judicial decision through executive action, saying “the president is heeding Congress’s call and Democrats will continue to be relentless in doing everything we can to lower costs and make college more affordable.”
That the president was using executive action — not seeking legislation from Congress — then, despite the nation’s highest court having blocked the executive branch’s earlier attempt did not bother Democrats.
That the president’s attempted circumvention of the judicial decision and legislation to shift debt to the general taxpayer from college borrowers also did not bother Democrats — despite only 38 percent of Americans having earned a college degree.
This at a time when the Biden administration was running up $7.5 trillion in deficits over fiscal 2021 through 2024. Yet they decry as fiscal calamity the extension of Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts that are simply an extension of current policy.
Democrats were unbothered by the president’s unilateral executive action to provide a financial windfall to borrowers, even as the withering inflation of the Biden-Harris era was savaging taxpayers.
For years, the left’s overarching talking point on the subject of President Trump has been “crisis.” Today, they declare that he is producing a constitutional crisis. They said he was “an existential threat to our democracy” and a “fascist” in 2024.
The truth is that Democrats can see no crisis unless they can attribute it to Trump. They see no crisis in trying to increase government, federal spending, federal deficits, and federal debt — only in Trump’s attempts to decrease them.
Amazingly, Democrats missed all the crises — constitutional, fiscal and economic — that Biden created by attempting to circumvent the judiciary with his college debt chicanery.
Democrats’ copious tears over the Constitution are strictly crocodilian. They are blatantly partisan, utterly hypocritical and thoroughly exhausted of efficacy from years of overuse.
The real crisis that Democrats understand all too well is their own lack of an agenda outside of opposition to Trump and a defense of the unsustainable status quo of big government, big spending, high taxes, and more deficits and debt.
J.T. Young is the author of “Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left.” He has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Management, and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
