They Were Never Going to Forgive Your Debt

Democrats are now once more saying they are unable to fulfill yet another campaign promise

A judge struck down President Joe Biden’s much vaunted mid-term election plan to slowly consider some people’s applications for partial student debt-relief. Many are acting shocked.

They shouldn’t be. Others are furious, though with too myopic of a focus - on Republicans.

Like so many campaign season Presidential promises before it (removal of troops from nations we’ve illegally occupied, giving of covid-relief checks, codification of Roe Vs. Wade, et. al) now that the most recent election has passed, even this most recent and meager promise has been stymied. Democrats, of course, are blaming the Republican Party because the judge who struck down Biden’s little plan was an appointee of President Trump.

The buck stops at the Republican Party with regards to awful judicial picks only for the historically ignorant. After all, it was Biden himself who as a Senator paved the way out of committee onto the Senate floor where confirmation was guaranteed for reactionary Clarence Thomas in the early 1990’s, and it is President Biden who just recently worked out a deal with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to appoint another anti-choice federal judge.

All that is to say that Democrats often work hand-in-hand with Republicans to appoint reactionary judges who then hand down corporation-friendly and all-around cruel rulings that limit our freedom. If Democrats were serious about preventing bad Republican judges from being seated they’d stop helping them into their robes.

Beyond that, the structure and rollout of Biden’s meager means-tested, potential, partial student-debt relief plan must also be blamed. If some voters are shocked that the plan was struck down it is doubtful that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party itself are.

Biden, an opponent for the last half-century of most forms of individual debt forgiveness, had the power to to issue a debt jubilee on student debt near instantly in an irreversible way. Instead, he announced a long process of possible partial forgiveness while at a time when the GOP promised to challenge it legally should they have the time for such a challenge to make its way through the courts, and while Biden himself publicly raised doubts about the legality of forgiving student debt.

This outcome was utterly predictable but still provided a couple months of positive press from lazy corporate media who erroneously reported that Biden “had” forgiven student debt (past-tense), when no such forgiveness had, in fact, taken place, and the environment Biden himself set up for it meant the plan might never be instituted. Of course, no context of the circumstances would be complete without explaining why informed observers realized there was never a reason to treat Biden as a good-faith actor when it comes to debt relief.

As a Senator Biden personally fought hard to create the current student debt crisis. Then, on his way out of the Senate and into the White House made it more difficult for people who had succumb to debt to get bankruptcy relief from the type of exploitative creditors who have donated to his campaign coffers so generously over the years. Then, Biden said he has “no empathy” for young people who find ourselves with record levels of student debt, scoffing and saying “give me a break.”

There was never any reason to believe Democrats had an intention of bailing us out the way they bail out corporations, banks, and financial institutions. We’re under a yolk that they worked with Republicans to create and members of both parties have been richly rewarded by their donors for doing so.