America’s Pandemic Dictatorship

Emergency use authorization laws are turning our representative government into rule-by-fiat autocracy

President Joe Biden announces student loan relief with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (R) in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Aug. 24, 2022. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

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 the United States.

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 were passed during the previous administration, when former President Donald Trump declared a national emergency with the spread of the CCP virus and the subsequent COVID-19 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, and impose travel restrictions and mask mandates, and handed agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration the power to approve untested and unproven vaccines for federal employees for use against the COVID-19.

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 that 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 isn’t 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 includes two legislative bodies or chambers: the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate can propose and write legislation. After various rounds of deliberation and tweaking, the House or Senate versions of the legislation are voted on for either passage or denial. But the same bill must pass by majority vote in both the House and the Senate before being passed to the president.

Once a bill is passed to the president, it will either be signed into law or vetoed by the president.

If it’s vetoed, both houses of Congress can vote to override the president’s veto with a two-thirds majority vote in favor of the legislation and against the president’s veto within 10 days of the veto.

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

Political Expediency Overrules the Law

But our leaders 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 said such an action can only be done through “an 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—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’s 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 2 1/2 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 the United States 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 is apparently 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.

A previous version of this article mischaracterized the lawmaking process for the United States. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

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