A handful of Republican-dominated states seemed on the verge of invalidating President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with a majority of the court’s conservatives indicating great skepticism.
In 2003, after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed a law to ensure that federal student loan borrowers would not be economically hammered in a national emergency. Specifically, the law says that when the president declares such an emergency, the secretary of education has the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” governing student loan programs.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations invoked the law to pause student debt payments without penalties during the pandemic. Then last year, President Biden, pressed by some progressives in his own party, went further with a plan to provide up to $20,000 in debt relief for borrowers with limited earnings.
Estimates of the plan’s cost have ranged from $300 billion to $430 billion, but on Tuesday at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts went high. We’re talking about “half a trillion” dollars in debt, and 43 million borrowers, he said. If you’re going to “give up” that much money and “affect the obligations of that many Americans on a subject that’s of great controversy, they would think that’s something for Congress to act on,” he added.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, replied that Congress had acted when it passed the 2003 law creating special provisions for student loan forgiveness during a declared national emergency.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed that when it comes to emergency powers, “some of the biggest mistakes in the court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive or…
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