Politics & Power Quote by Tim Bishop

Bishop’s line is a neat piece of legislative pressure dressed up as plain indignation. The opening “However” signals he’s rebutting a prior claim of concern for students, then immediately snaps the argument to a specific, nameable target: Perkins Loans. That specificity matters. In budget fights, abstractions are cheap; programs with titles and constituencies are harder to dismiss. He’s not debating “aid” in the generic. He’s daring the White House to defend cutting a policy that reads, to most voters, like the opposite of opportunity.

The sentence is built around a moral contradiction: you can’t credibly lament rising tuition while pulling a rung off the ladder for low-income borrowers. Bishop amplifies that contradiction by stacking inevitabilities (“is rising and will continue to rise”), turning tuition into a runaway escalator. That’s not just economic forecasting; it’s rhetoric designed to make the cut feel not merely wrong, but reckless.

The sharper subtext is partisan accountability. “This President” is a finger point, not a description. Bishop ties tuition increases to “the administration’s policies” and “inflation,” widening the indictment from one budget line to the entire governing agenda. It’s a classic move in opposition politics: local pain (college bills) becomes evidence of national mismanagement (inflation), and a discrete cut becomes a symbol of priorities.

Contextually, it reads like a moment when higher-ed costs were politically combustible and student debt was shifting from private worry to public issue. Bishop is positioning the budget not as bookkeeping, but as values made legible.