President Joe Biden
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President Biden’s unscripted public appearances aren’t that frequent, but when they occur they are often an adventure. Take his entirely fanciful comment in an interview released this weekend about his $426 billion student loan forgiveness plan.
The President sat down with some young liberal activists from NowThis News who asked him a question about student loans. While explaining the details about the forgiveness, Mr. Biden claimed that “It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two.”
Huh? You never know for sure what this President is thinking, but he seemed to be saying that loan forgiveness had passed Congress. Yet there never was a vote, or even an attempt to get legislative approval for the cancellation. The only “vote” was Mr. Biden’s, as he unilaterally declared the debt forgiven. His diktat was an extraordinary usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse, which is why several states are suing in federal court to stop it.
As he nears his 80th birthday on Nov. 20, Mr. Biden has a tendency to imagine that things happened even if they didn’t. The White House scrambled on Monday to say Mr. Biden was really referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, which did pass Congress. But mixing up the two is hardly better.
Mr. Biden was clearly confused about a basic question of law with major fiscal and constitutional implications. It’s disconcerting that he doesn’t even seem to know how major policy decisions were made in his own Administration only weeks ago.
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Appeared in the October 25, 2022, print edition as ‘‘I Got It Passed by a Vote or Two’.’
