Biden vows to pursue student debt relief with another law
Even as he denounced the Supreme Court ruling scrapping his student debt forgiveness program and blaming Republicans for going after it, President Biden said Friday his administration would make another attempt to stop student loans under a different law. to make.
The law Mr Biden cited, the Higher Education Act of 1965, contains a provision: Section 1082 of Title 20 of the United States Code — which empowers the Secretary of Education to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand however acquired, including any equity or right of redemption. “
Some proponents of student debt relief had suggested that the Biden administration invoke this law as the basis of the president’s original debt relief program. For example, in February 2021, a group of Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, submitted a resolution insist on that step.
But as the Covid-19 pandemic intensified, the Biden administration used instead a law giving the Secretary of Education the power to “waive or amend” federal student loan provisions in a national emergency. (A law passed by Congress to address the pandemic, the HEROES Act, may have made that route more appealing to policymakers, as it also exempted certain agency actions from the usual rules-making and notice-and-comment processes. .)
On Friday, the six Republican-appointed judges in a lawsuit brought by Republican-controlled states ruled that the government had stretched that law too far.
Should Mr Biden’s new plan face a similar lawsuit, which seems likely as a matter of political reality, it would end up before the same Supreme Court – raising the question of whether the differences in wording between the statutes will make any difference to make.
In the majority ruling, Chief Justice Roberts said that the words “waiver or amend” cannot legitimately be interpreted as granting the power to cancel debts on a large scale, and he invoked a conservative doctrine that courts should overrule actions by agencies that have “significant questions” if Congress did not clearly and unequivocally grant that authority.
While Mr Biden said on Friday he thought the Supreme Court got the law wrong, he insisted the new approach was “legally sound” and said he had instructed his team to act as quickly as possible. Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, had taken the first step in getting the process started, the president said.
Mr Biden predicted that the use of the Higher Education Act would take longer than his original plan, but said: “In my opinion, this is the best avenue left to provide debt relief to as many borrowers as possible.”
Ms Warren was also released in early 2021 a seven-page document from September 2020 by the Harvard Law School Legal Services Center, which she commissioned, with a more detailed argument about how the Higher Education Act could be used to forgive student debt.