Student loan holders participate in a protest outside the White House staff entrance to demand that President Biden forgive student loan debt.
Countess Jemal | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
The fate of the Biden administration’s sweeping student loan cancellation plan now hinges on the Supreme Court.
This may be bad news for borrowers, say legal and higher education experts.
“The conservatives in the court have been very aggressive in reversing the decisions of Congress and the president,” said Gregory Caldera, professor of political science at The Ohio State University. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the court invalidated the decree.”
Higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz agreed.
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“The United States Supreme Court is more likely than not to block the presidential plan to forgive student loans,” Kantrowitz said.
The highest court decided to take up the case after the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit emergency request ask the judges to lift the injunction on his pardon plan that was issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, at the request of six GOP-led states.
The judges, who will decide whether or not the president’s debt relief policy causes harm to plaintiffs or constitutes an excess of executive authoritysaid they would hear oral argument in February.
Ruling will ‘for now’ fix student loan issues
In August, Biden announcement that the US Department of Education would provide student loan forgiveness of up to $20,000 to tens of millions of Americans. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the plan will cost around 400 billion dollars.
Long before the president acted, Republicans had criticized the student loan forgiveness as a handout to wealthy university graduates. They also argued that the president lacked the authority to write off consumer debt himself without congressional authorization.
Without surprise, legal challenges have poured in. At least six lawsuits have been filed against the president’s plan.
Why the Supreme Court can block pardons
For a number of reasons, Urman predicts the Supreme Court will rule against Biden. He said Tory judges felt government agencies wielded too much authority and “violated the separation of powers”. Moreover, he said, the concept of loan forgiveness seems to run counter to their notions of individual responsibility.
Such a politically fueled decision, however, is likely to further damage the public’s perception of the Supreme Court, Urman said.
“Undoing the pardon will add to growing skepticism that conservative justices vote conservative and liberal justices vote liberal,” Urman said. Only 25% of Americans trust the highest court, Gallup poll finds found during the summer.
Cancellation of the pardon will add to growing skepticism that Tory justices are voting Conservative.
Dan Urman
law professor at Northeastern University
If the president’s plan is blocked, he added, it will be “another exampleas well as abortion and guns, of the court taking positions that a majority of Americans oppose.”
In a poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov in August, 51% of respondents said they support Biden’s loan relief plan. About 40% oppose the initiative.
“In the past, the Supreme Court generally ruled in line with public opinion,” Urman said.
Arguments on the limit of presidential power
Beyond the popularity of its debt relief plan, the Biden administration insists it is acting within the law, pointing out that the Heroes Act of 2003 grants the Secretary of State education the power to override student loan regulations in the event of a national emergency. The United States operated youunder a declaration of emergency since March 2020.
However, lawyers for GOP-led states argue that the administration should not be able to use the public health crisis to issue such sweeping policy.
“The administration is once again invoking the COVID-19 pandemic to assert its power far beyond anything Congress could have conceived,” the lawyers wrote in a brief to the judges, pointing out that the highest court had previously halted the nationwide ban on evictions imposed by the White House.
Yet a group of borrower advocacy groups, in a recent brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, said canceling student debt was essential to the country’s recovery from the pandemic.
The public health crisis has exacerbated financial hardship for “borrowers who have been at the mercy of a broken student loan system for decades,” they wrote.
Without cancellation, they warned, “working and middle class borrowers are at substantial risk of default.”