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Comment by mcs5280 | Hacker News Reader

Ok so next you're going to go after PPP loan forgiveness, right? I'll wait.

The difference is PPP loan forgiveness was approved by Congress.

Not saying it wasn’t poorly designed and implemented, and subject to massive levels of fraud - but forgiveness was clearly embedded into the law from the beginning.

It's an important difference. The White House basically pulled this broad student forgiveness policy out of their butts. They didn't have Congressional approval to do so, and were rightfully checked.

>We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.

The enabling law for this policy was the 2003 HERO's Act, which has been used prior to Biden's student loan forgiveness plan to modify loan conditions.

So this policy was approved by Congress.

The Biden administration used the emergency of the pandemic to justify loan forgiveness under the Heroes Act.

…Except the exact same week student loan forgiveness was announced, Biden went on 60 minutes and announced that the pandemic was over.

So even if you accept the argument that the Heroes act justified widescale forgiveness, the Biden administration did itself no favors selling that argument.

The cited reason in statute for the ability to waive or modify student loan provisions was to provide relief for hardship during a national emergency. Just because the emergency was technically near completion doesn't mean that there wasn't broad hardship that could be given relief.

Just like, say, the official national emergency of katrina ended waaaayyy before many of those affected no longer faced hardship from the emergency.

(Hurricane Katrina was never a national emergency.)

President Bush declared Katrina to be a national emergency on August 27, 2005.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2010/finalwebsite/katrina/gov...

> Before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Governor Katherine Babineaux Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 26, 2005, and asked President Bush to do the same at the federal level the next day, a request with which he complied. This authorized FEMA to organize and mobilize resources as it saw fit to help the residents of New Orleans (Office of the Press Secretary 2005).

That source does not support the claim, in particular not containing the word "national".

A federal level emergency is a national emergency.

The Republican Supreme Court cited a new conservative legal doctrine know as the "major questions doctrine" to issue this ruling.

Biden's own words aren't relevant.

I think his words are relevant. Whether or not the Supreme Court chose to cite them in this case.

I don’t think we should be cheering when our government digs for legal loopholes to get around the fact that it can’t pass a bill through Congress.

It's not a new doctrine, it's separation of powers.

I think both the ruling (and the major questions doctrine generally) and Biden's policy are bad.

PPP went through Congress, the Senate, and the President - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program#Le...

The government wasn't allowing certain businesses to operate and curtailed their operation. PPP was a response to that.

Nobody is forcing you to take on massive student loan debts.

The ability of the secretary of education to "waive or modify" any student loan repayment provisions during a national emergency that congress officially declared in order to provide relief to those affected by the emergency was also approved by Congress, the Senate, and the President.

All the PPP money I got went to my employees like it should have. I do however support going after those that hoarded it for themselves by fraud.

I'm not too up to date on this particular fact, as I disconnected from all that during the pandemic - which companies / businesses hoarded it for themselves?

I could have hoarded it for myself by paying myself a higher wage, or I could have fired all my employees and hired my family members.

I suspect this happened more than a few times.

That definitely should be done. But neither party will go after those people. They are donors after all.

That was a very short time limited emergency program. It's not a good analogy to blanket forgiveness. If this had somehow targeted some weird thing from the pandemic (paying some kind of reparations to students who were in college during '20 and '21 and had their experiences totally screwed up?) then it would be a better analogy.

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