This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 20, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Cato Institute has filed suit challenging the President's authority to spend without

congressional approval billions of dollars to cancel student debt.

Clark Neely is a senior vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute we spoke earlier today.

In response to President Biden's mass debt cancellation for many students, former college students,

many lawsuits have been filed.

What makes this suit different and why is it, do you think it's important for many different

groups to file their own suits when we're talking about many

billions of dollars. Yeah unfortunately the way things have developed courts are becoming increasingly inclined to turn efforts

to challenge plausibly unlawful government conduct into a kind of a game of

whackable where the question about whether the government is in fact

acting illegally never gets reached because they try to the courts will bend over backwards and try and find some way to find that a given plaintiff doesn't have standing or the suit isn't ripe yet or it's moot or there's some other reason why a particular plaintiff can't even be in court to challenge the program and so a number of organizations including most recently Cato have tried to come up with ways to assert a redressable injury

that would be sufficient to provide standing.

And the sort of the new twist in Nikato case is arguing that a pre-existing program called the

Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program that was designed by Congress to sort of enhance the ability of nonprofits to compete for employees has been

undercut, completely undercut and undermined by this unilateral executive action on the part of the

Biden administration and that's our sort of unique angle. So more broadly to hear

Tommy Berry tell it at the Cato Institute, the fact that the administration chose the Heroes Act as one of its reasons

for or reasons for claiming the authority to be able to do this without congressional permission is important.

Well, unfortunately, this is part of the pattern that we've seen through multiple administrations

that when the president wants to implement some policy but Congress hasn't

...