Read It For Yourself: Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Blocked By Judge
A district court judge in Texas has put a halt to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, yet another legal blow to the debt forgiveness program.
President Biden’s plan to erase federal student loan debts for tens of millions of borrowers hit a legal wall Thursday, when a U.S. District Court judge in Texas called it unlawful and vacated the debt relief program.
The federal government quickly appealed the decision, which came just weeks before student loan payments are set to resume in January. The program was already on hold while a federal appeals court in St. Louis considers a separate lawsuit by six states challenging it.
The judge’s argument for striking down debt relief
In Thursday’s ruling, Judge Mark T. Pittman, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote that the program was a “complete usurpation” of congressional authority by the executive branch.Pittman rejected the Biden administration’s arguments that, in a law known as the HEROES Act, Congress had already given the president the power to erase student loan debts in a time of national emergency and that the COVID-19 pandemic is just such an emergency.
“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,” Pittman wrote. “Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government.”
“We strongly disagree with the District Court’s ruling on our student debt relief program,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said. “The President and this Administration are determined to help working and middle-class Americans get back on their feet, while our opponents – backed by extreme Republican special interests – sued to block millions of Americans from getting much-needed relief.”
Late Thursday, the White House confirmed that it had already appealed the decision. That appeal will go to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a reputation as the most conservative of all federal appeals courts. From there, another appeal would land this case at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has so far refused to hear challenges to Biden’s relief plan. Borrowers likely won’t have a final answer on debt relief for weeks.
The Supreme Court won’t block the student loan debt relief program, at least for now
Meanwhile, student loan payments are set to resume in January. Back in September, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told NPR he hoped to process as many debt relief applications as possible before that payment pause ends on Jan. 1. Thursday’s decision makes it unlikely the department will reach that goal.President Biden announced on Nov. 3 that close to 26 million Americans had provided the necessary information to the Education Department to qualify for relief and that the department was already on track to approve cancellation for 16 million borrowers.
Now, the department cannot cancel those loans without a reversal of fortune in the courts.
Read the order halting the student loan forgiveness plan here:
student loan forgiveness
I express no opinion here on the soundness of the Court’s legal reasoning because, frankly, I’ve not read the opinion in sufficient detail to do so. Rather, I comment on the politics of the situation.
Democrats can argue that this was a Trump-appointed District Judge in the Fifth Circuit, which is also packed with Trump-appointed judges and one of the most conservative, if not THE most conservative, of the several Circuit Courts of Appeal. There was no need for the conservative activists who brought the suit to do so here, other than forum-shopping. And conservatives have also packed SCOTUS. So the result here appears likely to get affirmed on appeal and likely again before SCOTUS.
Meaning it will cost a little bit of time, which is plausibly justified as a defense of the government’s actions against an external challenge, for the Solicitor General to pursue those appeals and probably get those results in the next roughly two years. The banks will be collecting money on student loan payments as before throughout, so this costs nothing to anyone but the student loan debtors.
Who are, mostly, young people already resentful of the loan payments they believe (rightly or wrongly) were forced upon them on extortionate terms. They now know Biden tried to relieve this for them.
From the UK Guardian:
So here’s my proposition: this only accelerates the trend of younger voters being angered to the polls, and angered to vote in a Democratic direction. Which will set a pattern for them, a habit of preferring Democrats to Republicans. Are the Republicans sacrificing a piece of their long term political future to prevail on this issue today?Report
I think that the politics of the situation should also take into account that this doesn’t really address anything beyond the people who happen to have college debt right now.
Like, the kid in 9th grade? This does nothing to help them.
It doesn’t touch the structure at all and there are a dozen things that would actually touch the root instead of temporarily removing some leaves.
While I’m sure that there are many younger voters who might be energized to vote for democrats due to this, I looked up college enrollment rates and saw this:
There’s a joke that a buddy told me after the original announcement of the debt relief:
“Do you have any college debt?”
“No.”
“Well, you do now.”
While I’m pretty sure that there are people who will be motivated to vote Dem because of this, it strikes me as likely that there will also be people on the other side wondering about the “fairness” of paying off college debt for people who are likely to be better off anyway.
I don’t know that it’d be a wash, but given that this was set up to be a one-time thing, I’m not sure that it’d have legs beyond one or two elections before it becomes “where’s *MY* bailout?”
And given that this executive order appealed to a Covid Emergency Declaration as its justification, I’m not certain that they’d be able to do it a second time (of course they could just appeal to whatever emergency we’re going to be having when this rolls around again).Report
My cohort of 30-44 year olds was +4 Democratic allegedly and the 18-29 year old age group was plus 29 Democratic. My cohort was plus 4 Democratic mainly because of non-white voters. Under 30 voters was one where the majority of whites voted Democratic. At least based on initial glances, this usually takes months to fully flesh out.Report
It would be interesting to see actual data on why young people are so strongly Democratic.
In my experience, there isn’t any one Big Issue, like the Vietnam war. My hypothesis is that it is a range of issues, from college loans to abortion to anti LGBTQ bigotry to racism to global warming denialism that all sort of combine to create a deep anti-GOP sentiment among young people.Report
When I was a young adolescent in the early 1990s, MTV placed two openly gay people on the real world. You had Beth in 1992 and then more dramatically, Pedro the HIV-positive educator and activist in 1993. Pedro was also in a biracial relationship. Both seasons featured stories about their friendships with more conservative cast members.
I think these two somewhat quiet acts were much more world-changing than is normally given credit for because it is kind of cringe to credit the Real World with changing the world. The 1990s was still very conservative though and macho. This was the height of people using gay as a synonym for pathetic or something bad/basic.
I think under-30s these days now know more openly LBGTQ from middle on wards than my generation did. There are people I know from high school that are LBGTQ but they did not come out until after graduation even in my relative liberal town.
The open bigotry of older reactionaries now animating the GOP is a real disgusting thing for them.Report
There is a question about how much Trump’s picks to the judiciary will be the gift that keeps on giving even if Trumpism fails and we enter a new Democratic majority stage (yet to be seen but a possibility). McConnell and Leo managed to use Trump and luck to confirm a large number of judiciary spots. The judges they selected tended to be on the young side for judges. Some are not even 40 yet. They all tend to be highly ideological to the points of being firebrands. As Burt notes, this results in a fair amount of venue shopping and judges willing to take extreme positions like declare themselves the heads of DHS or questioning Biden’s role in the chain of command.
Perhaps they will be humbled by the election but I doubt it.Report
Hey, you’re a lawyer.
What’s your take on the court’s legal reasoning?Report
What kind of judge would be humbled by an election? Isn’t that a thorough misunderstanding of our system?Report
By the same reasoning, what about soldiers? If the results had favored the Republicans, would they be humbled by the election and start violating their oath?Report
Paging Mr. Dooley.Report
I think Republicans did pretty well in the election, given that Biden outspent them 100 to 1.
Does the fact that this was a blatantly unconstitutional abuse of executive power matter at all to you?Report
This case is a particularly dramatic illustration of the untenability of the “particularized harm” requirement for standing pulled out of the Taft Court’s collective ass in Massachusetts v Mellon. The debt cancellation inflicts hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on taxpayers in general, but because no one can claim particularized harm, no one can sue to stop this blatant abuse of executive power? That’s insane.
The Court needs to overturn Massachusetts v. Mellon and establish a mechanism for taxpayers as a class to sue to block unconstitutional spending.Report
To flip this around for those of you who can’t see how any policy you like could possibly be unconstitutional, consider a scenario where a Republican President cuts taxes by executive order. For example, the next Republican President might order the IRS to permanently cancel all tax liability on corporate income for the duration of his administration.
While this is obviously unconstitutional (note that I can acknowledge this while supporting abolition of the corporate income tax), no one can meet the “particularized harm” requirement for standing, so no one would be able to sue to stop it.
This is not a crazy hypothetical. If the Supreme Court declines to hear any cases regarding this issue on the grounds that no one has standing, I actually expect the next Republican President to use this loophole to implement some kind of tax cut by executive order.
Edit: I totally missed this, but there are a bunch of news stories from 2020 about Trump using executive order to declare a Social Security tax holiday (deferral, not full cancellation). That definitely should have been challenged if it actually went through, but I wasn’t able to find any follow-up on what happened.Report
I think your reaction is pretty over the top. The real gripe should be with Congress for writing vague laws the executive then interprets broadly. The remedy for that is for Congress to clarify the law. Our system anticipates attempted overreach and allows for better means of correction than requiring the courts to adjudicate any and all hypotheticals any person brings in the door. That’s particularly the case if the standard for standing you’re proposing is ‘individual is a tax payer.’Report
Okay. Next president cuts taxes by executive order. There’s not enough support in Congress for impaechment and removal. What remedies are available?Report
I’m not sure it’s possible to speculate on that hypothetical without quite a bit more information. So the boring lawyer answer is it depends.
But to the larger point I think you’re raising, the remedy for public policy we don’t like is usually the ballot box.Report
I’m sure we can find lots of other misuses for this.
We’re giving the President the ability to use the gov purse as a slush fund in a very large range of situations.
That corrupt when Biden tries to use it to get votes, and it’s going to be corrupt when Team Red tries to use it to get votes.Report
As I said initially, the gripe is that Congress passed an overly broad statute. The president then took an aggressive, opportunistic read of it. The solution is for Congress to clarify the law, not allow every citizen to try to litigate it in the federal courts under some nebulous theory of harm.Report
It doesn’t matter how clear the law is, since the merits of the case are totally irrelevant if nobody has standing to challenge executive spending. What the law actually says simply does not come up until standing is established.
That aside, I think your claim that this just isn’t a case for the courts is flat-out wrong. Resolving disputes over the of interpretation of the law is precisely what the judiciary is for.Report
With regard to the specific issue it does indeed appear to be working its way through the courts, hence this post. I’m not losing over that either.
What I am saying is that your theory of standing where any citizen can show up and sue without being harmed is a bad one.Report
The Administrative Procedures Act, ESA, and Marine Mammal Protection Act grant all citizens standing to sue for federal decisions taken under their auspices. So technically he’s not wrong.Report
As I have often noted, Congress holds and jealously guards the power of the federal purse. When it comes to federal spending, if the President gets too far outside the bounds they set, they do have standing to remedy this.Report