A federal judge in Texas has ruled that President Joe Biden’s student loan bailout program is illegal.
This week, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ruled in response to a lawsuit from the Job Creators Network Foundation. The foundation claimed they believed that Biden’s student loan bailout program violated federal laws, The Daily Wire reports.
The foundation filed the claim on behalf of two loan borrowers. One of the borrowers did not qualify for the full amount of loan forgiveness, and the other was ineligible for the program altogether.
“This case involves the question of whether Congress—through the HEROES Act—gave the Secretary authority to implement a Program that provides debt forgiveness to millions of student-loan borrowers, totaling over $400 billion,” Pittman wrote. “Whether the Program constitutes good public policy is not the role of this Court to determine. Still, no one can plausibly deny that it is either one of the largest delegations of legislative power to the executive branch or one of the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.
“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,” Pittman said. “Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government. As President James Madison warned, ‘[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.’ THE FEDERALIST NO. 47.”
Under Biden’s student loan bailout program, up to $10,000 of student debt – or up to $20,000 of debt for students who received federal Pell Grants – would be canceled for individuals earning less than $125,000 per year or married couples making less than $250,000.
The Biden administration has since stopped accepting applications for the bailout program.
“Courts have issued orders blocking our student debt relief program,” a note on the forgiveness application page at Studentaid.gov said. “As a result, at this time, we are not accepting applications. We are seeking to overturn those orders.”
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Goroden Koff
Amanda Casanova is a writer living in Dallas, Texas. She has covered news for ChristianHeadlines.com since 2014. She has also contributed to The Houston Chronicle, U.S. News and World Report and IBelieve.com. She blogs at The Migraine Runner.