Joe Biden didn’t just undermine his administration’s attempts to keep mask mandates alive with his declaration, “The pandemic is over.” Transit and schoolrooms aren’t the only places where Biden’s COVID authoritarianism has run amok, after all.

Stephen Miller made that point last night after 60 Minutes aired their interview with Biden. Miller used it as a basis for ripping Pelley’s handling of Biden, and for good reason. However, Miller raises an excellent point about Biden’s latest vote-buying initiative:

Biden used emergency covid declaration to enact student loan forgiveness and this is why Scott Pelley is a bad journalist and interviewer. https://t.co/ZCpdvrqf0S

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 19, 2022

Biden did indeed rely on a pandemic emergency declaration to grant himself the authority to appropriate as much as one trillion dollars to “forgive” (pay off) student loan debt. Biden’s Departments of Justice and Education cited the HEROES Act of 2020 as the legal justification for an end-run around Congress and their exclusive jurisdiction on appropriations. And that was based entirely on the predicate of an ongoing pandemic emergency:

The Department of Education, alongside the Department of Justice, released a legal opinion last Tuesday in defense of the groundbreaking administrative move, citing the HEROES Act.

The act provides the Secretary of Education broad authority to grant relief from student loan requirements during specific periods — such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — for particular purposes, like addressing financial harms of wars or national emergencies.

“The Secretary of Education has used this authority, under both this and every prior administration since the Act’s passage, to provide relief to borrowers in connection with a war, other military operation, or national emergency, including the ongoing moratorium on student loan payments and interest,” the opinion reads.

Even before Biden’s declaration last night, that legal argument was weak. The HEROES Act only gave authority to pay the monthly installments on the debt rather than the principal, as I wrote at the time, and furthermore had a specific appropriation for its execution:

There is nothing in the HEROES Act of 2020 that grants the executive the authority to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for wiping out student debt. Title V of the HEROES Act only provided — under congressional authorization — appropriated funds for Treasury to pay the monthly loan installments for students through September 2021, as well as suspension of “involuntary collections.” Congress only authorized Treasury to spend $45 billion for that entire student-loan suspension program, funds that were already long spent before Biden announced his bailout plan.

Now, however, Biden has undercut his own assertion of authority in declaring the pandemic over. That removes the entire basis of Title V in the HEROES Act and Biden’s extraordinary exercise of executive power. If the pandemic is over, so is the emergency, and the emergency measures of the HEROES Act expire.

And what better authority can we cite on that than the president himself?

This may not do much to advance the case into court. This declaration won’t affect the hurdles of standing when it comes to challenging Biden’s Academia bailout. However, Biden’s declaration vastly simplifies the challenge if and when a plaintiff does establish standing in a lawsuit to stop the trillion-dollar spending binge Biden pledged without any involvement from Congress. In a sense, Biden cut the legs out from under his own standing under the HEROES Act with his undisciplined rhetorical diarrhea last night. Let’s hope that a court provides some constitutional Immodium soon.