Joe Biden Ready To Cancel Supreme Court’s College Loans Or Something

Politico reports that the Biden administration is preparing to defend its student debt forgiveness program in the US Supreme Court, filing an initial brief in the case that argues the program is perfectly cromulent under authority Congress granted to the federal Department of Education in a 2003 law. The debt relief plan, you’ll recall, forgives up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for most qualifying borrowers, or up to $20,000 for folks who received Pell grants when they went to college.

A group of six Republican-led states sued to overturn the law, claiming it will deprive them of revenue; the SCOTUS case also combines that with a second lawsuit brought by a rightwing group on behalf of two borrowers who didn’t qualify for the program — this food is terrible and such small portions! The Supremes are scheduled to hear arguments in the case in February, and will probably decide sometime in June that not only must students pay loans back in full, but they must also get pregnant at their earliest opportunity or go to jail.

As Politico notes, the brief argues that neither the states nor the borrowers from Texas have standing to sue, but even if they do have standing, the program is completely legal anyway, you weasels, respectfully submitted.

Administration officials argue that they have the authority to cancel large amounts of debt under the HEROES Act, a 2003 law that gives the Education Department the power to waive the laws that typically govern federal student loans during national emergencies.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s “actions fall comfortably within the plain text” of the HEROES Act, the brief says.

The brief also points out that lower court injunctions putting the debt relief program on hold have already left “millions of economically vulnerable borrowers in limbo,” but isn’t that the point, to make them straighten up and take some responsibility instead of wasting all their income on luxuries like “rent” and “food for their children”?

The Biden administration has argued that the debt forgiveness program is legal under the HEROES Act because the coronavirus pandemic was very much a national emergency, and that bringing an end to the temporary pause on student loan payments would create a financial emergency if some of that debt were not offset.

The administration says that

“ending that pause without providing some additional relief for lower-income borrowers would cause delinquency and default rates to spike above pre-pandemic levels,” the Justice Department wrote in its brief. “This Court should not compel that damaging and destabilizing result.”

It’s hard to say whether this claim that a potential economic emergency would justify using a law’s emergency powers will carry any weight with the Court, which in its current composition may well say the 2003 law could only be invoked if it had specified the genetic code for the COVID virus’s spike proteins, including all variants.

As for folks hoping for some relief from their student loans, the bad news is that the Court will probably not rule on the case until June. That means no help for the roughly 16 million borrowers the Education Department has already approved for debt forgiveness, or for the 10 million other borrowers who are waiting to have their applications processed.

The good news is that the Education Department, very aware of the chaos that’ll result if the pause in debt payments ends while the case is pending, has extended that payment moratorium yet again, until either

60 days after the litigation is resolved or the administration is able to implement debt relief, whichever comes first. If the litigation is still unresolved by June 30, monthly payments will resume 60 days after that date, the department said.

In the interim, the administration may want to suggest that the Supreme Court try working within its own budget and not ordering so much avocado toast, and does Brett Kavanaugh really need the latest model of iPhone?

[Politico / Biden V. Nebraska brief / Photo: Quinn Dombrowski, Creative Commons License 2.0]

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