President Joe Biden’s $1.5 trillion 2023 deficit makes it easy to forget that a generation ago, federal spending was in balance. President Bill Clinton’s final four budgets, from 1998 to 2001, had surpluses. 

But although Biden, other Democrats, and the wider Left have abandoned even lip service to fiscal discipline, they certainly haven’t forgotten every lesson they learned 25 years ago. Indeed, they have taken one Clintonian tutorial deeply to heart and cling to it as no administration has before. It is the lesson that lawlessness pays. 

Clinton and his lieutenants treated laws as being there to bend or break if they could expand executive power. This was their guiding principle, if it can be called a principle, and their modus operandi. The White House began issuing executive orders on an industrial scale. Paul Begala, one of Clinton’s praetorian guardsmen, cynically commented, “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kind of cool.” 

His statement dripped with the triumphalist gloating of an administration that governed by illegal decree and knew it was getting away with it. A less adept speaker, Vice President Al Gore, adumbrated the underlying theory when, after violating Section 607 of the criminal code by soliciting campaign money from the White House, he repeated endlessly that there was “no controlling legal authority” to say what the law meant and whether he’d broken it. Gore is as nimble as a lamppost, but his stolidity served well to show where the Democrats had decided to stand. 

Thenceforward, they’d respect no rule, law, or custom unless and until it had been set in stone by litigation. The meaning of plain language would be treated as a mystery. Democratic administrations would do whatever they wished by executive order until the matter in question was decided in court. Even after defeat, they’d probably do the same thing a different way and challenge critics to further bouts of legalistic jousting. 

The Democratic Party’s governing motto became, “So, sue me.” 

In 2011, then-President Barack Obama acknowledged that he had no unilateral presidential authority to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants but must administer the laws as enacted by Congress. He added, “For me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” But the following year, he did exactly that, arguing that congressional opposition had ceased to be normal representative government and had degraded into unacceptable obstruction. 

This was a harbinger of more to come, and with Obama’s veep now in the Oval Office, lawless government by Democrats has sunk to a whole new level. 

In 2021, the Supreme Court had to slap down the Biden administration for trying to give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “a breathtaking amount of authority” when it sought, without congressional action, to stop landlords from evicting tenants who didn’t pay their rent. Biden also tried to impose a vaccine mandate on private businesses and had to be told he didn’t have the authority. In 2022, Biden imposed a federal mask mandate on travelers, an effort to extend government powers during the coronavirus pandemic. But this was ruled out by a district court in Florida. This same president sought unilaterally to end the migration health policy known as Title 42, but a federal judge had to step in and say he was again exceeding his authority. 

Now Biden is at it again. The Supreme Court nixed his unauthorized decision to transfer the $400 billion burden of student debt to taxpayers from the people who actually borrowed and benefited from the money. In ruling this unconstitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts cited former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who, in a 2021 press conference on student debt forgiveness, said, “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.” 

Undeterred, Biden is now trying another route to the same end. His administration is trying to forgive $39 billion of student debt before the 2024 election by camouflaging it as the correction of a clerical error. It’s a bureaucratic “adjustment,” not a blatant bribe for young people’s votes. 

Rule by executive fiat has its limits, as Biden’s string of legal rebukes demonstrates, but the Democrats are testing them to the breaking point. They know that they cannot have limitless power until they hobble the courts that keep handing them defeats. That’s why the party has shifted into top gear to control the federal judiciary with threats of impeachment, to pack the Supreme Court, and to conduct a constant smear campaign against conservative textualist and originalist judges. 

There are three branches of the federal government. Democrats would much prefer to have just one. 

Reprinted with permission from the Washington Examiner. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.