We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges
Through student loan "cancellation", the Biden Administration continues to show total disrespect to the Constitution.
"Badges?! We don't need no stinking badges!"
This widely quoted paraphrase of a line of dialogue from the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is what I heard after seeing Biden, once again, ignoring law, tradition, respect for the Constitution – everything – to announce he was unilaterally “cancelling” portions of student debt.
Anybody who is surprised at this and how they “found” the authority to do it is either slow or not paying attention. Most of us saw this coming a couple of weeks ago when Biden extended the pandemic “emergency”, ensuring that federal measures expanding access to health coverage, vaccines and treatments - and other things useful to the regime - remain in place beyond the November midterm elections.
One of those things they found useful was when they determined that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (“HEROES”) Act of 2003 granted the Secretary of Education the authority that could be used to effectuate a program of targeted loan cancellation directed at addressing the financial harms of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shyster lawyers in the White House found that this Act “provides the Secretary broad authority to grant relief from student loan requirements during specific periods (a war, other military operation, or national emergency, such as the present COVID-19 pandemic) and for specific purposes (including to address the financial harms of such a war, other military operation, or emergency).”
That's where they get the authority. They basically made it up just like they did the eviction moratorium and the ability to force landlords to stop collecting rent.
They just pretend they have authority and at the same time, to no one’s surprise, they also pretend they don’t need that authority.
They honestly see no limits to what they can do, so much so, I am even surprised they even try to stretch the interpretation of existing laws to fit.
That they treat Constitutional limits as they do is as obscene as a portly transwoman in a thong in the checkout line at Walmart.
But it isn’t like we weren’t warned. I mean like from 1788 being warned.
Biden and his junta members are exactly the people James Madison warned us about in Federalist #51 when he wrote:
"But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Our system of government is based on a sense of propriety – the characteristic of not only knowing what can be done, but what should (and should not) be done. In a free and civil society, government has legitimacy because we treat it that way. We count on people to respect the Constitution, as well as swearing to protect and defend it.
The Constitution was the “auxiliary precaution” Madison was defending in #51. He assumed that government officials would accept the Constitution as the line that must not ever be crossed.
He never met Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden – or any of the people in the orbits of these people.
Madison knew that an overweening government with an entrenched bureaucracy was the most effective delivery system of man’s most corrupt, evil and corrosive desires – those being the desires to elevate themselves and to have control over other men.
Humans have the capacity for the greatest good and the most hideous evil. Such was, is and shall always be the dichotomy of the human condition.
Our representative republic only works when people are constrained by their own respect for the Constitution.
The Democrats no longer possess that characteristic.
Lord Acton was clearly correct – power does corrupt, and absolute power does corrupt absolutely.
Thanks for providing the alleged "rationale" for this give away program. I hadn't yet seen it elsewhere.
Though it is usually shortened to the last two sentences of its middle paragraph when cited, I love the fuller context of John Adams' letter to the Massachusetts Militia:
"While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while she continues Sincere and incapable of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned Us by Providence. But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."