Trump Appointed Judge Kills Biden's Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Program

A Trump-appointed federal judge has struck down President Biden's student loan debt relief program, saying that the plan was illegal because it wasn't specifically approved by Congress. This is a very loose interpretation of the order, as the Department of Education DOES have discretion to forgive certain loans for certain reasons, and those reasons were expanded with COVID legislation. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this issue.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Late last week, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, Judge Mark Pittman of the US District Court, um, struck down President Biden's student loan debt forgiveness program, said the whole thing is totally unconstitutional. It was a gross abuse of power by the Executive branch because such a large scale program would clearly have to be approved by Congress. And Congress, he says, Did not approve this. The Biden administration has already appealed, uh, this decision by Judge Pittman here arguing that, Hey, we actually did have authorization to do this under the Heroes Act because the broad language under which, uh, or, or with which that law was written, does give us authority to do this. Not to mention the fact, I don't know if they put this in their appeal, but they should have, Uh, the United States Department of Education actually has broad power to forgive certain student loans under certain circumstances.

Circumstances that they basically get to lay out themselves. We, we don't need the heroes Act for that. We have seen time and time again, and this even happened by the way, under the Trump administration, where the Department of Education would come out and say, Hey, listen, All right, all you people here, you got scammed by this fake online university. We're gonna forgive all your loans. They, they didn't have to have Congress approve that. They just did it. They said, Okay, the circumstances were pretty bad, so we're just gonna do this. They've done it this year. They did it last year, did it the year before. They've done it for quite a while now. They said, You got scammed, you got lied to, so we're gonna forgive your loans. Nobody batted an eye about that, right? You didn't have these Republican groups out there saying, No, you can't do that.

That's not fair. But for some reason, this one, sure it's bigger, but why this, Why object to this and not object to the others? I think that is a question these judges ought to be asking. But they're not, of course, a Trump appointee here. So he doesn't care about actual jurisprudence. No. He didn't bother to say, Well, hold up now. Why didn't you get mad when they forgave student loans to, you know, ITT Tech or whatever it was? Why didn't you file a lawsuit then? Same thing, except it's more laser focused. Doesn't make sense, does it? You're only objecting to this for political reasons, therefore, your objection cannot stand. But that's not what happened. That's what should have happened. If we had a real functional justice system here in the United States, that's what a judge would've said, would've thrown out the case on the merits, arguing that, no, this is selective prosecution or selective, uh, uh, I, I don't know the word. You don't use prosecution, but you know

What I, I mean, like, you're only targeting this because you don't like it politically, not because you have any real grievances with the program itself. Oh, and by the way, the individual, the plaintiff in this lawsuit personally had $48,000 worth of p p loans forgiven. So this individual who became the plaintiff of this particular lawsuit had almost $50,000 of their debt forgiven by the federal government, but says, Oh no, you cannot have $10,000 forgiven. That's playing politics with it. I will not stand for this. I got mine. You can't have yours. I want you to be in debt. handed this massive defeat.