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Comment by tacticalturtle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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