Two quotes, unalike in veracity. One’s fictional, one’s real. Can you, au fait reader, discern which is true?
John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it. —President Andrew Jackson
The Supreme Court blocked it but that didn’t stop me. —President Joe Biden
The downside of internet search engines is that they take the mystique and fun out of riddles. Why guess when you can Google?
As you can lazily discern from Wikipedia like me, Old Hickory never issued his infamously defiant rebuttal to the Supreme Court Chief Justice, who, with the Court majority, issued an opinion in Worcester v. Georgia overruling the southern state’s prohibition on white men living in native territory. Jackson, after being reluctant in marshaling federal force to impose the ruling, soon acquiesced.
Joe Biden has no such compunction. He’s outright defying a Supreme Court decision in order to bribe voters during his re-election run. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what democracy looks like!
Last summer, the high court held Biden’s student loan write-off as unconstitutional. The affirming justices came to their decision through careful deliberation, prudent analysis, and hyper-technical legal reasoning, which was as follows: Uh, dude, you can’t do that without Congress.
The Court’s dissenting liberal bloc countered with their own deep-textual reading of the nation’s inviolable laws: Yeah, but, like, it’s not fair!! (When asked to define “fairness,” the Court’s newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, demurred, insisting “I am not an ethicist.”)
President Joe Biden, an accomplished legal scholar himself, so much so that he couldn’t bother to draft his own law reviews, put forth another interpretation of the decision: Well, you see, I really, don’t, um, whattdya call it, uh, hmmmm, *stares blankly, pupils recede into his milkily murky eyes, housefly descends into his confused, gaping mouth*, oh, um, care.
Last month, Biden Administration functionaries issued an email notification to over 150,000 debtors with the welcome news: “Congratulations—all or a portion of your federal student loans will be forgiven because you qualify for early loan forgiveness under my Administration’s SAVE Plan.” What does SAVE stand for? Supposedly “Saving on a Valuable Education,” but it might as well mean “Sucker Americans Very Expropriated.”
The total debt wiped from the fisc ledger amounts to $1.2 billion—a picayune pinch of the monstrous federal budget, but a boon to baristas earning $15-an-hour with psychology B.A.s.
The latest debt-zeroing brings the Administration’s total student loan scotching to $3.9 billion, which, again, is a mere scratch in the total federal largesse. The feds probably spend more each year teaching endangered whooping cranes to wire lithium-ion batteries in electric cars.
But in a democracy—or, to ease our civic pendants, constitutional republic—process matters. A country ruled by pure plebiscite devolves, by and by, into mob rule. In American democracy as normally practiced, whim is constrained by an accepted code of conduct, with little room for flexibility or feeling. There are rules, as John Goodman says—or, rather, shouts.
To the fuddy-duddy notion of a rule of law, President Biden says, here’s the deal, I’ll do what I want. Repeat the line. End of quote. Stand for applause. *Wanders outside onto South Lawn.*
If paying off thousands of in hock graduates nudges out Donald Trump in November, that’s what he’ll do, Supreme Court interdiction be damned. And if he can oversee the prosecution of his opponent, in cahoots with friendly district attorneys, to ding, smear, sully, distract, bleed, and possibly jug him, even better.
All in the name of democracy, of course. Ignoring the injunctions of one branch of power to enrich one set of voters at the expense of another, while exercising the full capacity of your own power to deprive the selfsame voters of a different candidate, is the kind of third-world autocratic self-dealing America diplomats caw about at UN junkets. Now it’s a pom-pom-shaking headline in The New York Times.
The apotheosis of American democracy will be reached when the Republican presidential frontrunner is frog-marched into a federal pen, while college grads cheer and ballyhoo popcorn over perp-walk snippets on TikTok, feasting on the DoorDash they purchased with Biden’s loan forgiveness.
Democracy dies in a grease-dampened takeout bag.
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