RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/can-anyone-sue-over-bidens-student-loan-lawlessness/?utm_source=

It’s not clear, and the answer might be no.

The Biden administration is using a flatly absurd legal argument to justify forgiving student debt, something even Democrats thought was only a power of Congress not that long ago.

Even the Department of Education thought it was only a power of Congress not that long ago. On January 12, 2021, the department’s office of general counsel published a legal opinion that cited Congress’s power of the purse under the Constitution and said, “The Secretary does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, and/or materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof, whether due to the COVID-19 pandemic or for any other reason.”

But now, as if by magic, even though the laws are all the same, the office of general counsel has found legal authority for the secretary of education to go it alone. The legal opinion this time around cites the HEROES Act, which was passed after 9/11, and claims that the emergency powers given to the secretary under that law “could be used to effectuate a program of targeted loan cancellation directed at addressing the financial harms of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Never mind that the 2021 opinion specifically considered the HEROES Act and found its provisions too narrow for blanket cancellation. Never mind that student-loan recipients have already benefited tremendously from a repayment pause of over two years due to the pandemic. Never mind that the unemployment rate is currently at 2 percent for college graduates, and financial harms from the pandemic are mostly a thing of the past.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unmaking-of-american-history-american-historical-association-james-sweet-presentism-activism-1619-project-academics-professors-11661532876?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Academic historians are losing their sense of the past. In his August column for the American Historical Association’s journal, Perspectives on History, James H. Sweet warned that academic history has become so “presentist” that it is losing touch with its subject, the world before yesterday. Mr. Sweet, who is the association’s president and teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, observed that the “allure of political relevance” is drawing students away from pre-1800 history and toward “contemporary social justice issues” such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.” When historians become activists, he wrote, the past becomes “an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.”

Mr. Sweet knows his audience, so he did his best to appease the crocodile of political correctness. He denounced Justice Clarence Thomas for a gun-rights decision that “cherry-picks historical data” and criticized Justice Samuel Alito for taking the word “history” in vain 67 times in his Dobbs abortion opinion. But Mr. Sweet also pointed out that Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” isn’t accurate history, and that “bad history,” however good it makes us feel, yields bad politics. “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.”

History’s armies of nonacademic readers will find this obvious and undeniable. Mr. Sweet’s academic peers, however, tore him to pieces on Twitter, accusing him of sexism, racism, gratuitous maleness and excessive whiteness.

“Gaslight. Gatekeep. Goatee,” said Laura Miller of Brandeis University, detecting patriarchal privilege written on Mr. Sweet’s chin. Benjamin Siegel of Boston University, who thinks his politically correct profession is “leveraged towards racist ideologies,” called the essay “malpractice.” Dan Royles of Florida International University accused Mr. Sweet of “logical incoherence,” which is academic-speak for “idiot.” Kathryn Wilson of Georgia State detected an even more heinous error, “misrepresentation of how contemporary social justice concerns inform theory and methodology.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mar-a-lago-affidavit-is-that-all-there-is-donald-trump-fbi-justice-department-merrick-garland-11661547313?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

A federal judge on Friday released a heavily redacted version of the FBI affidavit used to justify the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and we can’t help but wonder is that it? This is why agents descended on a former President’s residence like they would a mob boss?

It’s possible the redactions in the 38-page document release contain some undisclosed bombshell. But given the contours of what the affidavit and attachments reveal, this really does seem to boil down to a fight over the handling of classified documents. The affidavit’s long introduction and other unredacted paragraphs all point to concern by the FBI and the National Archives with the documents Mr. Trump retained at Mar-a-Lago and his lack of cooperation in not returning all that the feds wanted.

A separate filing making the case for the redactions, also released Friday, focused on the need for witness and agent protection from being publicly identified. That filing also contains no suggestion of any greater charges or a larger investigation than the dispute over his handling of the documents.

As always with Mr. Trump, he seems to have been his own worst enemy in this dispute. He and his staff appear to have been sloppy, even cavalier, in storing the documents. Classified records found in boxes were mixed in with “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes,” and presidential correspondence, the affidavit says. This fanned suspicion that important documents were still floating around the house, where bad actors hanging around the Mar-a-Lago resort might pilfer them.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/biden-robs-peter-to-get-pauls-vote/

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on Paul’s vote. That political axiom is the crux of Joe Biden’s decision to forgive vast quantities of student loan debt. He needs Peter’s and Patricia’s votes, and he is bribing them with taxpayer money. Taxpayers know it is not a costless gesture. Their backlash is likely to overwhelm any potential gains.

The problems begin with the program’s cost and inflationary impact. Spending another $300 to $900 billion, the estimated cost, raises consumer demand without increasing supply. Since the program is not funded by tax increases, it will be paid for by printing money. The inflationary consequences are predictable.

Democrats wave away these costs by noting, correctly, that loan forgiveness doesn’t start until next year and won’t happen all at once. Still, the program underscores the most consistent element of the Democrats’ domestic agenda. They are determined to spend, spend, spend. Voters correctly link that spending to inflation and to their own declining standard of living. They see inflation as a tax on everyone, and they know wages have not risen enough to offset that tax. Reminding everyone that inflation is linked to excessive federal spending is not smart politics. But that’s exactly what Biden’s loan forgiveness does.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-8-25-the-governments-most-audacious-lawless-act-yet-and-a-potential-response

Every day it gets harder to keep up with the accelerating lawlessness of the Biden Administration. The basic strategy is, just do whatever the left wants, using all the vast powers and resources of the federal government, and dare anyone to try to stop you. To mention just a few recent examples, one day it’s a multi-trillion-dollar transformation of the energy economy without Congressional authorization (perhaps slowed down by the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA); the next day it’s holding meetings to pressure tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to censor the speech of political opponents; next it’s weaponizing the Justice Department and FBI to investigate and prosecute the leading political adversary on the flimsiest of pretexts. Additional examples could fill tomes.

But now we have what could well be the most audacious lawless act yet. I’m talking about the plan to “cancel” some hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, announced by President Biden on Wednesday August 24.

With this one, they’re barely pretending to have a legal basis. Supposedly, according to the Department of Education’s legal memo, it’s the 2001 HEROES Act, 20 USC Section 1098bb(a)(1) and (2)(A), passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, giving the Secretary of Education authority to “waive or modify” provisions of student financial assistance programs at times of “national emergency”; combined with the current Covid-19 “national emergency,” just extended by Biden past the upcoming election. Does this fool anyone? It’s the most naked possible vote buying, in the run-up to the mid-terms. The cynical political calculation is that the Democratic Party base of upscale young college grads will show their gratitude for the $10,000 or $20,000 handouts with their votes, while the blue collar workers who never took out student loans will not perceive how they are getting hosed. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will likely strike this down under the Major Questions Doctrine when the issue finally gets there, but by that time this election (and probably the next one) will be long over. Maybe a Democratic Congress can even pack the Court by then.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3615803-next-up-bidens-energy-crisis/

We’ve had Biden’s inflation and Biden’s recession; now we face Biden’s energy crisis. It didn’t have to be this way.

Twenty million Americans are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

Who is surprised? Even as real wages tumbled 3.6 percent over the past year, electricity prices increased 16 percent, squeezing consumers. Unhappily, things are about to get worse.

Natural gas, used to create power and to heat almost half of America’s homes, is trading at prices nearly double those of last year, and the winter heating season promises to bring even higher prices.

The price of natural gas today is the highest since 2008, before the fracking revolution unleashed almost unlimited gas deposits trapped in tight formations that were previously inaccessible.

Why should the United States suffer a giant increase in costs if we have so much gas? In part, because President Biden pledged this year to double our exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), which means less natural gas available to American consumers.

Biden made that grand gesture to help our allies, who are increasingly cut off from Russian oil and gas because of the war in Ukraine. But he made that promise to send more U.S. natural gas overseas even though the price was already soaring and inventories were low.

But barring an adverse court ruling, young Americans with student debt are now set to receive a five-figure handout. And everyone else is set to pay for it.

https://www.city-journal.org/biden-cancellation-of-student-debt-indefensible

After months of will-he-or-won’t-he suspense, President Biden has announced his executive actions on student debt. The administration plans to cancel up to $10,000 for borrowers currently earning up to $125,000 annually ($250,000 for married couples)—with the maximum forgiveness doubled for the students who, based on their parents’ finances, received Pell Grants when they attended college. Biden will also extend the pause on payments “for one final time” through the end of the year and allow those with undergraduate loans to cap their payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income, as opposed to 10 percent under current policy. Because the “cancellation” is really a transfer, the combined changes will cost taxpayers something like $500 billion—about $1,500 for every person in the United States.

Forgiving student debt may be a savvy way for Biden to appeal to young, left-leaning voters, but it’s indefensible as policy. Beyond the baseline question of whether the government should ever wipe out the willfully assumed debts of a preferred class of Americans at the expense of everyone else, the program is a poorly targeted use of taxpayer funds, rewards the dysfunctions of the higher-ed sector, and is likely illegal.

Yes, the limits placed on the program make it less of a bonanza for the upper-middle class than it could have been. The largest debt loads are typically held by those with advanced, not just undergraduate, degrees, so blanket forgiveness would have been a massive windfall for young lawyers. But the $125,000 income threshold doesn’t come close to targeting the most sympathetic cases: those who were preyed upon by low-quality colleges, often didn’t even earn a degree, and wound up working at the proverbial Starbucks. The median earnings for a U.S. female working full-time and year-round were about $50,000 in 2020; for a male, the number was roughly $60,000. Yet the White House set its cutoff for five-figure handouts at more than twice those amounts—and, citing numbers prepared by its own Department of Education, boasts that 87 percent of the debt relief announced yesterday will go to those earning less than $75,000 in individual income. Even that would be an odd threshold for taxpayer largesse, as it’s above the 2020 median household income and more than triple the 2022 Federal Poverty Level for a family of three. But rest assured: “only” about $65 billion will go to individuals earning even more than that by themselves, at a cost of $200 per U.S. resident.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/under-biden-youre-4-times-more-likely-face-irs-daniel-greenfield/

“I direct that any additional resources… shall not be used to increase the share of small businesses or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Treasury Secretary Yellen wrote to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

That directive has been used by media “fact checkers” to deny that the massive increase in IRS personnel under Biden’s Inflation Increase Act will also increase audits of the middle class.

Yellen’s statement initially seems reassuring until you look closely at its curious language.

Treasury Department spokeswoman Julia Krieger used the same phrasing when claiming that “audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year” would not increase.

“Historical” is an interesting term. Media fact checkers act as if it means current rates. But if it means current rates, Yellen and the Treasury spokeswoman could have just said so. The specific use of “historical norms” by both women is not an accident: it’s policy.

What’s the difference between “current rates” and “historical levels”?

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that from 2010 to 2019, audit rates dropped from “0.9 percent to 0.25 percent” due to “reduced staffing as a result of decreased funding”. Audit rates for taxpayers earning from $25,000 to $500,000 were even lower at 0.17%.

Would “historical norms” cover 2010? It’s hard to believe that they would not. Even the most generous interpretation of Yellen’s language is that IRS audit rates would significantly increase.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/25/student-debt-forgiveness-bidens-illegal-inflationary-inequitable-attempt-to-buy-votes/

President Joe Biden’s plan for student debt “forgiveness” is nothing of the sort. It merely takes money from one group of taxpayers and gives it to another. It will not increase access to education, or improve it at all. And it will drive up inflation. In short, it’s yet another leftist sham intended to cull votes from the unthinking herd.

After leaking that the debt forgiveness scheme would amount to about $10,000 per eligible student, the White House — surprise! — made it $20,000 instead, doubling the damage that will ensue.

Under the program, Pell Grant recipients will be eligible for that $20,000 in relief, versus $10,000 for all others. And it goes only to those earning less than $125,000. It also extends the current loan repayment “pause” though the end of this year, while capping the amount a student has to repay at 5% of income.

There are so many problems with this idea it’s hard to know where to start.

How about this: The president doesn’t have the right under the Constitution to “forgive” anyone’s debts. It’s not in his list of superpowers. But that’s just some crazy right-wing idea, you say?

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no shrinking violet when it comes to leftist lunacy, understands this: