Student debt: Is Biden’s plan legal?
“A slew of legal challenges” could stymie President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, said Michael Stratford in Politico. Last week, the constitutionality of the plan was challenged in lawsuits by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which is representing one of its employees, and six Republican-led states. To eliminate a central legal basis for the lawsuit, the Biden administration amended eligibility, with people whose student loans are owned by private companies—as opposed to the federal government—no longer qualifying. The administration claims only about 770,000 of the country’s 40 million–plus borrowers will be dropped from loan forgiveness. Biden’s plan, which will cost an estimated $420 billion, “will likely be defeated in court,” said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to appropriate money, and Biden’s unilateral decree “flies in the face of the separation of powers.”
Actually, the conservative lawsuit is likely to fail, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. To sue, a plaintiff must demonstrate harm to have legal “standing.” The PLF claims that Biden’s loan forgiveness harms Indiana public interest attorney Frank
Garrison by overriding his existing student loan relief plan and requiring him to pay a $1,000 state tax penalty. The White House has since announced a revision to allow borrowers to opt out of forgiveness—meaning Garrison wouldn’t have legal standing, and neither would other loan holders. Conservatives should be ashamed, said Sarah Jones in New York magazine. Student loan debt penalizes poor and minority students “for trying to get ahead.” By suing to prevent forgiveness, the Right is “waging class war,” and a victory “could keep millions shackled to debt.”
Most of the beneficiaries of loan forgiveness are not poor, said The Washington Post in an editorial, and the issue of whether Biden can magically wave away billions in debt “seems worthy of review.” To justify this ambitious intervention, the Biden administration is using the pandemic and an “expansive reading” of the 2003 Heroes Act, which lets the secretary of education alter student loan programs during a national emergency. But the president’s decision to distribute “vast sums of public money” without congressional authorization is, at best, legally questionable. The courts should decide if Biden has authority to do this, “preferably before he has actually done it.”