When Chief Justice John Roberts vaporized Joe Biden’s half-trillion-dollar student loan forgiveness plan in June, he used some dramatically non-legal words to explain why. Writing for the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority in the case of Biden v. Nebraska, Roberts declared that the truly offensive and unacceptable thing about the Biden plan, which would have wiped out the loan balances of nearly 20 million people, was the sheer size of it.
The economic and political significance of the scheme was “staggering by any measure,” wrote Roberts, and thus ran afoul of the Court’s radical new doctrine of limiting presidential power.
Later that day, an angry Biden responded from the White House. His administration had been accused of being unprepared for other seismic court actions, like the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This time was different. The president announced that the Department of Education would immediately begin re-implementing the loan forgiveness plan using a different legal rationale. Progressive lawmakers and grassroots activists, who had been pressing the administration to continue the fight, cheered in response.
But Biden’s so-called “Plan B” for mass loan cancellation comes at a perilous moment for student borrowers. For the last three and a half years, federal student loan payments and interest charges have been suspended because of the pandemic. Under the terms of the last-minute debt ceiling deal struck between the White House and congressional Republicans in June, the Department of Education is required to turn the loan repayment system back on in September. Monthly payments are due starting in October.
Meanwhile, some of the same scholars who laid the legal groundwork for the original mass cancellation plan are saying that the Supreme Court will likely kill the new plan, too.
The Biden administration is urging people to start paying their loans this fall. But it has also announced a year-long…
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