For as long as he’s been president, Joe Biden has been vexed by student loans.
His primary opponents pushed him to endorse mass loan forgiveness legislation during the 2020 campaign, then pressured him in the days after the election to wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in debt with the stroke of his executive pen.
After years of back-and-forth deliberations, he finally announced an enormous loan forgiveness initiative last year, only to have the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, as the pandemic stretched for months and then years, he extended the moratorium on loan payments seven times, until congressional Republicans used the threat of financial armageddon to force the collection system back into operation, even as they under-funded the federal agency responsible for collections. Only weeks after payments became due again in October, the Department of Education levied stiff financial penalties on student loan servicers for bungling the job.
But Biden is not giving up. On Monday, the Department of Education announced new plans to forgive billions of dollars in loans held by struggling borrowers. If it works, people who have spent decades under the yoke of monthly payments will finally be free of their obligations. The question is whether the Supreme Court will once again blow up Biden’s loan forgiveness ambitions before they leave the ground.
Biden’s first loan forgiveness initiative would have forgiven $10,000 from nearly every federal student loan, and up to $20,000 for low-income borrowers. The Court ruled that the plan was too big — “staggering by any measure,” in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts — and was not based on clear legal authority provided by Congress. The new Biden forgiveness plan is based on a different federal law, the Higher Education Act, and — since the Court’s six-member conservative majority made clear that any attempt to simply replicate the original plan was doomed to fail —…
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