The U.S. Court of Appeals just averted a constitutional crisis — Democrats should be relieved.
That it came from blocking yet another attempt by former President Joe Biden to shift billions in debt from college students to the general taxpayer should make no difference to those with such acute constitutional concerns, right?
So, to recap, there was a definitive Supreme Court ruling followed by repeated attempts by a president to circumvent it. The judicial branch determined and the executive branch ignored it. Were the Biden-Harris administration still in office, there’s no reason to believe — based on repeated prior attempts — that the executive branch would not still be ignoring the judicial branch.
If ever there were the makings of a constitutional crisis, this would seem to have it.
For weeks, Democrats have been echoing the mantra of “constitutional crisis” over the Trump administration’s DOGE efforts to cut spending, personnel, and regulations. However, there is no Democrat roar of approval here. In fact, the silence is deafening.
Democrats could also be cheering the avoidance of fiscal and economic crises with the appeals court ruling. Biden’s debt shift from college borrowers to general taxpayers would have meant adding billions more to a burgeoning budget deficit.
And had that debt been shifted, it would have amounted to a windfall to borrowers who assuredly would have spent some or all it, further adding to price pressures that have been sizzling since Biden took office in 2021.
Strangely, Democrats are not cheering for the avoidance of these crises, either.
When Biden first announced his mammoth college debt shift, Democrats cheered.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called it “one of the biggest acts of consumer debt relief in American history.” In April 2024, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) applauded Biden’s attempts to circumvent the judicial decision through executive action, saying, “The president is heeding Congress’s call, and Democrats will continue to be relentless in doing everything we can to lower costs and make college more affordable.”
That the president was using executive action — not seeking legislation from Congress — then, despite the nation’s highest court having blocked the executive branch’s earlier attempt did not bother Democrats.
The president’s attempted circumvention of the judicial decision and legislation to shift debt to the general taxpayer from college borrowers also did not bother Democrats, despite only 38 percent of Americans having earned a college degree.
This at a time when the Biden administration was running up $7.5 trillion in deficits over fiscal 2021 through 2024. Yet they decry as fiscal calamity the extension of Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts that are simply an extension of current policy.
Democrats were unbothered by the president’s unilateral executive action to provide a financial windfall to borrowers, even as the withering inflation of the Biden-Harris era was savaging taxpayers.
For years, the left’s overarching talking point on the subject of President Trump has been “crisis.” Today, they declare that he is producing a constitutional crisis. They said he was “an existential threat to our democracy” and a “fascist” in 2024.
The truth is that Democrats can see no crisis unless they can attribute it to Trump. They see no crisis in trying to increase government, federal spending, federal deficits, and federal debt — only in Trump’s attempts to decrease them.
Amazingly, Democrats missed all the crises — constitutional, fiscal, and economic — that Biden created by attempting to circumvent the judiciary with his college debt chicanery.
Democrats’ copious tears over the Constitution are strictly crocodilian. They are blatantly partisan, utterly hypocritical, and thoroughly exhausted of efficacy from years of overuse.
The real crisis that Democrats understand all too well is their own lack of an agenda outside of opposition to Trump and a defense of the unsustainable status quo of big government, big spending, high taxes, and more deficits and debt.
The Real Constitutional Crisis Isn’t Coming From Trump
Republicans are in power, so Democrats are back to pretending to care about the Constitution.
As Democrats struggle to attack Trump 2.0, the national propaganda press is pushing a new narrative.
Earlier this month, a New York Times newsletter posed the question, “A constitutional crisis?” Three days later, The New York Times reported, “Trump’s actions have created a constitutional crisis, scholars say.”
Whenever you see the phrase “scholars say” in a news report, tread carefully. It’s very likely to be a poorly disguised opinion piece. The article’s slant depends entirely on the “scholars” interviewed by the author. In this case, many other scholars would say Trump is returning the government to its constitutional limits.
The left quickly picked up this line of attack.
“What is a constitutional crisis? And why some scholars say we’re in one,” a Washington Post analysis read.
“Are we in a constitutional crisis?” an NPR headline asked.
“We’ve got our toes right on the edge of a constitutional crisis here,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said.
That sounds scary, at least until the left has to define its terms. The New York Times called on Erwin Chemerinsky, law school dean of the University of California, Berkeley, to do that. He objected to Trump “revoking birthright citizenship, freezing federal spending, shutting down an agency, removing leaders of other agencies, firing government employees subject to civil service protections and threatening to deport people based on their political views.”
That list doesn’t show a constitutional crisis. All it really shows is that Trump is keeping his campaign promises. No wonder Trump’s popularity is riding high.
Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship is already winding its way through the courts. The Supreme Court will almost certainly decide the issue. Anyone who thinks Trump’s move is not based on historical facts needs to study the issue more. Regardless, Trump has already said he’ll abide by court decisions.
“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” Article II of the Constitution states. It’d be a constitutional crisis if the entrenched bureaucracy could stymie how a president wanted to run executive branch agencies. The president’s power must include firing employees and controlling discretionary spending.
The last item seems to be a reference to Trump’s executive order “to combat anti-Semitism.” Trump has vowed to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.” Deporting immigrants who support a terrorist group is common sense.
While the concerns about Trump are misguided, the propaganda press is inadvertently right that the country does face a constitutional crisis — from Democrats.
In January, former President Joe Biden proclaimed on X that a new amendment had been added to the Constitution. It hadn’t. The Biden administration weaponized the Justice Department to go after Trump, his leading political rival. The Supreme Court struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. He then proceeded to cancel debt for millions of borrowers anyway.
“The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me,” Biden bragged.
Leftist authors routinely call for dismantling constitutional provisions, including the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and the Electoral College.
“We’re living under a flawed Constitution. Let’s start fresh and rewrite it,” Chemerinsky wrote last August. Yes, that’s the same guy The New York Times cited as an expert to explain how Trump is creating a constitutional crisis.
Democrats don’t view the Constitution as something to protect and respect. They view it as a club to wield when their opponents gain power. But they openly ignore its limits when they’re in charge.
Remember what happened with the filibuster for presidential nominees? Rules that only one side follows are hard to sustain.
Democrats’ duplicity is the real constitutional crisis.
