STUDENT LOAN RELIEF FACES SUPREME TEST
Biden $400B plan to cancel debt opposed by 6 red states
President Biden’s $400 billion blueprint to cancel crushing student debt for millions of Americans faces a critical hearing Tuesday, when the Supreme Court plans to wrestle with a multistate challenge to the program.
At oral arguments, the Supreme Court is set to weigh challenges to a White House plan to wipe out up to $20,000 in student loans for low-income Americans and up to $10,000 for individual earners making up to $125,000 a year.
The relief program, premised on executive authority granted in national emergencies, would touch a projected 43 million Americans and wipe the full debt balances for an estimated 20 million borrowers.
Six Republican-led states sued over the plan, which was announced by the Biden administration last August. The Supreme Court fast-tracked the case in the fall, after a lower court blocked the plan. A ruling is expected by early summer.
The case marks another politically polarizing expedition for the conservative Supreme Court, which erased abortion protections and expanded gun rights in an unusually bitter term last year.
Members of Congress and debtors are expected to demonstrate outside the Supreme Court in support of the Biden program.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat and the House minority leader, charged on Twitter that “Extreme MAGA Republicans are working overtime to stop us from helping those with student loan debt.”
Polls have found a slim majority of Americans support Biden’s plan. It would amount to a historically expensive executive action and has been derided by Republicans as an overreach by the White House.
In the lead lawsuit against the program, challengers argued in a filing that the Supreme Court must “stop the administration from unlawfully invoking COVID-19 to assert power beyond anything Congress could have conceived.”
“Canceling hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans — through a decree that extends to nearly all borrowers — is a breathtaking assertion of power,” states the filing.
The challenge was filed by the governments of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina. A secondary suit stems from a Texas case brought by two borrowers who suggested they were unfairly blocked from full access to the program.
The White House, which spurned calls from some Democrats for a more far-reaching debt cancellation strategy, has expressed confidence in the legal underpinnings of its plan.
Before moving forward with the program, the president ordered the Education Department to review whether it was legal for him to bypass Congress.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration at the Supreme Court, said in a November filing that Biden’s plan “falls squarely within the plain text of the [education] secretary’s statutory authority.”
Prelogar also argued that the six GOPled states did not have standing to bring the case in the first place.
Depending on the analysis of the Supreme Court’s nine justices, the case may hinge not on questions about executive authority, but on whether the states
suffered legally recognizable injuries that grant them standing to sue.
The court’s finding on that question could have “profound implications for the federal courts,” Temple University law professor Mark Rahdert told the Daily News.
“If they have standing here, the states will always have standing in any situation in which a federal policy has economic consequences that might affect state revenues,” he said.
“That’s a pretty broad array of federal policies that could easily be attacked by the states in almost any situation,” Rahdert added.
Partisan legal challenges by states opposed to federal policies have increased since 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency that states are “entitled to special solicitude” in the court’s analysis of standing.
The court’s finding, delivered in the majority opinion in the 5-to-4 case, came as a win for liberals, allowing Massachusetts to sue the EPA under former President George W. Bush to force the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
But the ruling emboldened both ends of the political spectrum to pursue legal avenues to frustrate federal policies they oppose.
In a dissent in the Massachusetts case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that an easing of standing requirements on the basis of injuries asserted by states had “no basis in our jurisprudence.”
Roberts, a conservative, was joined in the dissent by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two members of the court’s current six-justice conservative bloc.