Welcome to Schrödinger’s Pandemic
President Joe Biden speaks to media before boarding Air Force One as he departs for Washington from New Castle, Del., September 11, 2022. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morni...ngers-pandemic/
By Jim Geraghty
September 20, 2022 9:10 AM



On the menu today: President Biden told 60 Minutes that, “The pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” The problem is that a bunch of his administration’s policy and budgetary priorities — including the student-loan-forgiveness plan! — are based upon the pandemic not being over. Grandpa gets confused, and once again, the president’s words and his administration’s actual policies are no more than distant cousins. Elsewhere, we say farewell to a friend.

Biden’s All-Purpose Pandemic

You may have noticed that Joe Biden doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what he says until after he says it — “minor incursion,” “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” “You ain’t black,” and his repeated insistence that the U.S. has an established commitment to defend Taiwan where one doesn’t exist. This past weekend, Biden’s habit of blurting out the first thing that pops into his mind once again made a hash of his administration’s policies.

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In that 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Biden was eager to take a victory lap, boasting that:

The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so, I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.

The problem is that several Biden administration policies rest upon the argument that the pandemic is not over. Much like Schrödinger’s cat being both simultaneously alive and dead, the pandemic is both over and not over, depending upon what Biden and his administration need at any given moment.

As our Charlie Cooke observed, this off-the-cuff comment abrogates the entire justification for Biden’s student-loan-debt cancellation:

Why does Biden’s statement matter so much? I’ll tell you: It matters because the memo that the Biden administration released to justify his order rested entirely upon there being an ongoing emergency, and because, as Biden has just confirmed, there is no ongoing emergency.

Back in August, Biden’s lawyers argued with half-straight faces that the 2003 HEROES Act — which, as Bloomberg Law has noted, was passed not as a generalized enabling act but “to help borrowers serving in the military in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks” — could be twisted to apply to any national emergency, including pandemics such as Covid-19. This, of course, was nonsense. Among the specific problems with Biden’s argument was that the 2003 HEROES Act does not cover debt cancelation (i.e., transference to taxpayers); that its “direct economic hardship” language does not allow for mass relief; that the application of its “or national emergency” language clearly violates the -- excerpt, rest at link above --