One of the biggest reasons why people have such bitter disdain for lawyers as a whole is because over time, that class of elites will end up taking over an entire government. And besides the natural positions within the Supreme and District Courts that are stocked full with former J.D.’s, the current President and Vice-President are also former lawyers, with a majority of the House and Senate coming from that vocation as well.
At the start of the 114th Congress on Tuesday, the U.S. Capitol will be a little less lawyerly. But not by much. Members of Congress holding J.D.s will sit in 160 of the House of Representatives’ 435 seats and 53 of the Senate’s 100. - National Law Journal
So perhaps it comes as no surprise that those who run the government would look out for their own far more than the overall American people. And on March 28, a new ruling out of the U.S. Bankruptcy court in Brooklyn, NY provided a way for students who work towards law degrees to be allowed to dismiss their student loans, while the other 99.4% of in-debt American students are left out in the cold.
In an opinion filed Thursday, Judge Carla Craig of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., said bar-exam loan debt is “a product of an arm’s-length agreement on commercial terms” and doesn’t fall into the category of student loans that stick with a borrower who files for bankruptcy.
The decision, which is the most thorough recent ruling on the matter, contradicts the widely accepted notion that student loan-related debt can be canceled in bankruptcy only under rare cases of extreme financial hardship.
In her 20-page ruling, Judge Craig said bar-study loans were akin to commercial or consumer loans and weren’t an “educational benefit,” like a scholarship or stipend, and thus could be erased in a bankruptcy case.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear a case that could have made it easier to get rid of student loan debt. The White House, however, said last year that it would examine whether it should be easier for student loans to be canceled by bankruptcy, opening the door for student debt made by private lenders to be treated on par with credit-card debt and mortgages. – Wall Street Journal
Congress has put limitations on expunging student loan debts since 1978, but in 2005 then President George Bush made it nearly impossible to write off this form of debt through the passage of the Bankruptcy Reform Bill. And in addition to this, President Barack Obama co-opted over 97% of the entire student loan industry, making the debts on par with tax obligations, and debtors in bondage to the Federal government.
Just as it was a lawyer (Eric Holder) who coined the phrase, ‘too big to jail’ to allow the criminal banks to get off without indictments, now it is another lawyer shrouded in a black robe who has ruled that lawyers can function as a protected class and receive benefits not open for the rest of society.
Kenneth Schortgen Jr is a writer for Secretsofthefed.com, Examiner.com,Roguemoney.net, and To the Death Media, and hosts the popular web blog, The Daily Economist. Ken can also be heard Wednesday afternoons giving an weekly economic report on the Angel Clark radio show.