Randi Weingarten — the nation’s top teacher, in a sense — seems ignorant of what any child could learn about government from “Schoolhouse Rock.”
The American Federation of Teachers boss made that painfully clear (and we mean painfully) Tuesday by launching into an unhinged tirade in front of the Supreme Court, as justices were hearing challenges to President Joe Biden’s college-loan-forgiveness plan.
“This is what really pisses me off,” she fumed, literally screaming and jumping. During the pandemic, “small businesses were hurting, and we helped them. . . . Big businesses were hurting, and we helped them. And it didn’t go to the Supreme Court.” Yet, “all of a sudden, when it’s about our students . . . the corporations challenge it, the student-loan lenders challenge it.”
Hello? Yes, federal aid helped businesses during the pandemic but only after Congress passed COVID rescue packages to keep the economy afloat. Neither President Donald Trump nor President Biden unilaterally ordered handouts to anyone.
Yet Weingarten (a lawyer as well as an educator!) claims it’s now fine for Biden to forgive hundreds of billions in debt from student loans without lawmakers’ say-so. And that it’s “not fair” for anyone to even challenge that in court.
If only she’d watched those “Schoolhouse Rock” shorts, explaining the separation of powers: Congress passes laws and holds Uncle Sam’s “purse strings.” If student loans are wiped out, that counts as a hit on the US Treasury, even if funds covering those balances (as much as $1 trillion) get rolled into the national debt, as they would.
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The president is supposed to execute laws Congress passes; he can’t simply shower mountains of taxpayer dollars on whatever causes he chooses. And if he tries, Americans have every right to ask the courts to stop him.
Yet Biden didn’t even try for lawmakers’ OK on his debt-relief plan; he simply decided to bypass Congress altogether. That’s a thumb in the eye not just to the system but to lawmakers — and the voters who elected them.
Even Team Biden itself admitted he couldn’t act without Congress — until it suddenly changed its mind last year, claiming the power under a beyond-dubious reading of the post-9/11 HEROES Act, which offered relief to soldiers heading to war.
Look: A one-time erasure of student debt never made sense. It cheats those who never had such loans or had them but paid them off. And it benefits only a small group of Americans who, in many cases, won’t truly need the aid. And average taxpayers foot the bill.
But what’s really scary is that the national teachers-union head is so ignorant (or pretends to be) about how our democracy works. No wonder America’s schools are in such sorry shape.
