America’s Pandemic Dictatorship

Commentary

With the stroke of a pen, President Joe Biden established a new plan that strongly resembles legislation. However, no one in the legislative branch of government agreed to it or had anything to do with its creation.

The president’s student loan forgiveness plan is just the latest exercise in what amounts to government-by-fiat in America.

The new plan that eliminates student loans up to $20,000 is celebrated among the left in this country, with few mainstream media outlets pointing out its unconstitutionality. The plan wasn’t drafted by any member of Congress, wasn’t considered by either the House of Representatives or the Senate, and certainly wasn’t voted on by any representative law-making body.

Cut Out of Whole Cloth

The debt forgiveness plan was cut out of the whole cloth by the president’s team and assumed the president’s authority from two separate laws.

The pandemic emergency use laws passed during the previous administration when former President Donald Trump declared a national emergency with the spread of the CCP virus and the subsequent pandemic.

That emergency declaration gave the federal government and unelected bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unconstitutional power to close businesses, halt rent collections by landlords, impose travel restrictions and mask mandates, and agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration the power to approve untested and unproven vaccines for federal employees for use against the coronavirus.

The Biden administration has asserted that the pandemic emergency use laws give the president the authority to create the law solely by executive order since the state of emergency declaration in the country has yet to be lifted.

The second law the Biden administration references is the HEROES Act of 2003. That law was passed during the Iraq War and authorized the administration in a national emergency to reduce or eliminate student debt.

Constitutional Lawmaking 101

This is not the process our representative government is meant to follow, as expressed in the Constitution. As a quick reminder, the creation of laws in this country must begin in the legislative branch, which is the House of Representatives in Congress.

Members of the House of Representatives propose and then write a bill. After various rounds of deliberation and tweaking, the bill is presented to the full House of Representatives, where all 435 House members vote on the bill.

If the bill is passed by the House, it is then sent to the Senate, whereupon, after deliberation and possibly some additional tweaking, the Senate votes on the bill. If the bill is not passed, it is sent back down to the House, the lower chamber of Congress, to be either rewritten or abandoned.

But if the bill is passed by the Senate, then the bill is sent to the president to either be signed into law or vetoed by the president. If the bill is vetoed, both houses of Congress can vote to override the president’s veto with a two-thirds majority vote in favor of the bill and against the veto within 10 days of the president’s veto.

This is pretty basic stuff—Constitutional Lawmaking 101–or ought to be for most Americans and certainly for our leaders.

Political Expediency Overrules the Law

But they ignore the Constitution in favor of political expediency.

Even far-left Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi came out against the Biden administration’s student loan debt forgiveness plan as recently as July 2021.

“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power,” Pelosi said at a press conference.

The Speaker of the House asserted that such an action can only be done through “and act of Congress.”

But that, of course, was last year.

Now, just three months before the midterm elections, Pelosi wholeheartedly approves of the plan, never mind that the administration has usurped congressional power and thereby eliminating the American people’s representation—to bring the plan into existence.

The Death of Our Representative Democracy?

But what about our elected leaders’ oath to uphold the Constitution? Where is their defense of our representative form of government that’s supposed to be a government that’s by the people and for the people?

The short answer is that it’s gone.

Consider the reality that a handful of powerful people have bypassed Constitutional law to impose unlawful and dangerous mandates upon 335 million Americans over the past two and a half years under the pretext of a medical emergency. That’s how dictatorships begin.

The list of those wielding power is short. The president of the United States, the speaker of the house, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the chief medical adviser to the president, the director of the CDC, and a few others in positions of authority have been the decision-makers for the rest of us.

Today, the Biden administration is picking winners and losers in America and making the losers pay for the winners’ loans.

Yes, there will be legal challenges to this new plan—but will it matter?

Nearly half the country apparently is uninformed about what a massive power grab this is or doesn’t care about the freedoms and responsibilities that come only with our Republican form of government.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.