Just who is the king of D.C.’s bureaucracy?

“That didn’t stop me,” President Biden declared after the Supreme Court blocked his $430 billion student loan write-off in 2023. It sure didn’t.
After striking out in court with three debt forgiveness schemes, the Administration last week unveiled another.
Take that, judges.
The Education Department says its proposed rule would authorize forgiveness for some eight million borrowers experiencing “hardship.”
Under the rule, the department can discharge debt if it calculates a borrower has an 80% likelihood of defaulting on payments within the subsequent two years based on 17 factors such as income, debt balances and assets.
The rule would effectively let the department forgive debt of any borrower any time it wants. The administration says high child-care costs could qualify as a hardship. How about high auto loan or credit-card payments? Did someone say moral hazard?
Borrowers are already allowed to postpone payments if they experience hardships, but the department says such forbearance isn’t enough.
It also says that its latest plan “would reach borrowers” who “do not sufficiently benefit from other currently available forgiveness options”—and there are many such options.
They include the Administration’s SAVE plan, which caps monthly payments at 5% of income above $33,885 and cancels remaining debt after 10 to 20 years. An Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in August blocked the SAVE plan, but the Administration has waived payments for millions of borrowers already enrolled.
In addition, the department’s public service loan forgiveness program cancels debt for nonprofits and government workers after 10 years. The Administration has eased terms so more borrowers would qualify and last week advertised that it has forgiven $74 billion in debt under the program — about $74,000 per borrower.
In April the department released a plan that cancels accrued interest for 25 million borrowers and forgives debt of those who entered repayment over 20 years ago or who “enrolled in low-financial-value programs” — meaning, for-profit colleges.
The plan also promised to waive debt for borrowers with a “hardship.”
A federal court last month blocked that plan, but the department says its new rule “would operate separately and distinctly.” Courts are playing whack-a-mole with the Administration’s debt write-offs that end-run Congress, which never authorized such broad-based debt forgiveness.
Such lawlessness is one reason so many Americans discount the left’s assertions that Donald Trump endangers democracy.
Mr. Biden acts like he’s king, and Democrats and media voices cheering him on have no standing to object if Mr. Trump follows the Biden precedent.
The Wall Street Journal