Supreme Court rejects President Biden’s student loan relief plan

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Biden’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness program, ruling that the president reached beyond his authority with his plan to delete heavy debts held by more than 40 million Americans.

In taking a hammer to one of Biden’s signature policies, the conservative high court dashed the dreams of legions of low-income borrowers. But the 6-to-3 decision came as a victory for Republicans and others who saw the plan as an abuse of executive power and an unfair giveaway to college graduates.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion and was joined by the rest of the court’s six-member conservative bloc. The court’s three liberals dissented.

The court considered the case, a multistate legal challenge, after the Biden administration moved last summer to cancel up to $20,000 in loan debt for low-income Americans, and up to $10,000 for individual earners making less than $125,000 per year.

The plan, which was projected to erase the full debt balances for 20 million borrowers, had been premised on a 2003 law called the HEROES Act that allows the Education Department to modify financial aid programs in times of national emergency. The White House cited the COVID emergency.

Since the start of the pandemic, the federal government has placed a pause on student loan repayments. The Biden administration planned to end the freeze by permanently wiping away some of the debt facing borrowers.

In a filing in the lead case against the program, Biden v. Nebraska, challengers urged the Supreme Court to prevent the White House from “invoking COVID-19 to assert power beyond anything Congress could have conceived.”

The challenge was filed in September by the governments of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina. A secondary case stemmed from a Texas lawsuit brought by two borrowers who suggested they were unfairly blocked from full access to the program.

The Supreme Court rejected that challenge in a unanimous decision on Friday, finding that the borrowers lacked standing to bring the case.

The cases marked another Supreme Court foray into politically polarizing territory, after the court erased abortion protections and expanded gun rights in an especially bitter term last year. On Thursday, the court banned affirmative action.

Polls have shown that a majority of U.S. voters support Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, though not always by overwhelming margins.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-to-3 conservative supermajority, appeared to buy the arguments of the six Republican-led states that sued over the program.

Biden, who came under pressure from progressives to order even more aggressive student debt cancellation, moved cautiously before announcing his program last year, asking the Education Department to review his authority to act without Congress.

Later, his administration maintained that it was on solid legal footing, and said the red-state challengers lacked legal standing to bring the case in the first place.

But after a skeptical Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the matter last winter, Biden acknowledged the shaky fate of his blueprint. “I’m confident we’re on the right side of the law,” the president said in March. “I’m not confident about the outcome.”

In New York, home to some 2.4 million borrowers hampered by federal student loan debt, Democrats held out hope in recent weeks that the Supreme Court would side with the White House. State lawmakers passed a bill to ensure that discharges from the loan forgiveness program would be exempted from state income tax.

But the Supreme Court sided with the GOP challengers, the latest in the string of Republican victories at the court.

The high court has tilted far further to the right following the installation of three conservative justices during Donald Trump’s presidency.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.