Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is now limiting President Joe Biden’s power as president after she shot down Senator Chuck Schumer’s proposal to have Biden forgive student loan debt.
During a press conference on Tuesday alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Schumer called on Biden to pause and end federal student loan payments.
“We are also continuing to call on President Biden to use his existing legal authority to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt,” Schumer said. “This pause has actually shown how important canceling student debt is to borrowers and to our economy… ten times over, canceling $50,000 in debt would be even more important and helpful to these folks who are borrowers, to get the economy going, and to deal with the racial inequality which student debt has exacerbated.”
“All President Biden has to do is flick his pen and sign it,” Schumer continued. “Make America a happier, better, more prosperous place. We’re going to keep fighting until this happens.”
In a shocking development, Pelosi, who is also known for her far-left ideas, shot down Schumer’s plan, stating that President Biden does not have the authority to forgive student loan debt.
“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. That has to be an act of Congress,” Pelosi said during a briefing on Wednesday.
“I do think that what the president is putting forth in Build Back Better, in terms of opportunity for all Americans whether they go to college or not — you know, they may not even aspire to that, and that’s fine, and that’s fine — but we do want to give them vocational training or other opportunity so they can reach their fulfillment as well,” she said.
Pelosi then took a play out of the Republicans playbook when she noted that a family with a child who didn’t want to go to college wouldn’t be happy with paying to “forgive somebody else’s obligations.” She continued: “We want all of our kids to reach their fulfillment. To the extent that they want to go to college, we do not want them to be prohibited from doing that for financial reasons.”
It is unclear if Pelosi is secretly trying to limit Biden’s overall power as president or if she truly is against student loan forgiveness.
In February, Biden himself says he wouldn’t forgive $50,000 in student loan debt because he didn’t think he had the authority to do so. In the same breathe however, Biden bizarrely claimed that he DID have the authority to forgive $10,000.
“Under authority ceded to him under the Higher Education Act, the White House believes that Biden is able to forgive $10,000 per individual federal student loan borrower through an executive order,” The Daily Wire reported. “As White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained at the time, Biden planned to commission a review under the Department of Justice to determine his legal authority to cancel loan payments. Months later, however, student loan forgiveness was entirely left out of President Biden’s first budget proposal.”
