Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments over President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, starting a decision-making process that will affect the balance sheets of tens of millions of Americans.
The nine justices will consider two legal challenges to Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers: one from six GOP-led states (Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina) and another backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation, a conservative advocacy organization.
Long before the president acted, Republicans had criticized loan forgiveness as a handout to well-off college graduates. They also argued that the president didn’t have the power to forgive consumer debt on his own without authorization from Congress.
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Biden’s policy has faced at least six lawsuits since it was rolled out in August. Dozens of Republican members of Congress have also filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan should be ruled unlawful.
There’s no precedent in U.S. history for the kind of sweeping debt forgiveness that the White House has promised to deliver, although consumer advocates point out that large corporations and banks have been bailed out by the government after going through their own crises. And they say that canceling a large share of education debt is necessary to relieve the many borrowers struggling from a broken lending system.
“The court must see these lawsuits as the partisan sham they really are and protect the Biden administration’s historic relief plan,” said Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “Borrowers deserve better than to be treated like…
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