WASHINGTON--The U.S Supreme Court handed President Joe Biden a painful defeat on Friday, blocking his plan to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt - a move that had been intended to benefit up to 43 million Americans and fulfill a campaign promise.
The Democratic president denounced the 6-3 decision - powered by the court's conservatives and written by Chief Justice John Roberts - and announced fresh steps to provide relief for student loan borrowers using a different approach. The court sided with six conservative-leaning states - Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina -that objected to Biden's student loan forgiveness. Its ruling dealt a blow to the 26 million borrowers who applied for relief after Biden announced the plan in August 2022 and represented a political setback for Biden. "Today's decision has closed one path. Now we're going to pursue another," Biden said at the White House, announcing steps being taken under a law called the Higher Education Act. "I'm never going to stop fighting for you. We'll use every tool at our disposal to get you the student debt relief you need - and reach your dreams." Roberts derided the Biden administration's argument that the loan forgiveness programme - a move linked to the national emergency arising from the COVID-19 pandemic - was merely a modification of an existing programme and noted that such broad action would require clear congressional approval. "The secretary's plan has 'modified' the cited provisions only in the same sense that the French Revolution 'modified' the status of the French nobility - it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely," Roberts wrote, referring to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
"From a few narrowly delineated situations specified by Congress, the secretary has expanded forgiveness to nearly every borrower in the country," Roberts said. The court's three liberal justices dissented. The court acted on its final day of rulings in its term that began in October. The ruling invoked the "major questions" doctrine, a muscular judicial approach that gives judges broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of "vast economic and political significance" unless Congress clearly authorized them in legislation. The conservative justices previously used this doctrine to invalidate other Biden policies including pandemic-era eviction protections for residential renters and his COVID-19 vaccination-or-testing mandate for large businesses. Biden's plan fulfilled his 2020 campaign promise to cancel a portion of $1.6 trillion in federal student loan debt but was criticized by Republicans who called it an overreach of his authority and an unfair benefit to college-educated borrowers while other borrowers received no such relief. Under the plan, the U.S. government would forgive up to $10,000 in federal student debt for Americans making under $125,000 who obtained loans to pay for college and other post-secondary education and $20,000 for recipients of Pell grants to students from lower-income families.
The administration said the plan was authorized under a 2003 federal law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act, which lets the education secretary "waive or modify" student financial assistance during war or national emergencies. Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump both relied upon the HEROES Act to repeatedly pause student loan payments and halt interest from accruing to alleviate financial strain on student loan borrowers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
