Conservative justices question Biden student loan forgiveness plan

United States Supreme Court Building (IBJ file photo)

Conservative justices holding the Supreme Court’s majority pressed skeptical questions Tuesday about President Joe Biden’s plan to wipe away or reduce student loans held by millions of Americans.

The high court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, heard arguments on two challenges to the plan, which has so far been blocked by Republican-appointed judges on lower courts.

Arguments were scheduled to last two hours but were likely to go much longer.

Several conservative justices spent time grilling the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Elizabeth Prelogar, and suggested that the administration had exceeded its authority with the program.

Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to the wide impact and expense of the program, which is estimated to cost $400 billion over 30 years.

“If you’re talking about this in the abstract, I think most casual observers would say if you’re going to give up that much … money. If you’re going to affect the obligations of that many Americans on a subject that’s of great controversy, they would think that’s something for Congress to act on,” Roberts said.

Roberts’ fellow conservative, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, suggested that the administration was using an “old law” to unilaterally implement a debt relief program that Congress had rejected. He said the situation was familiar: “In the wake of Congress not authorizing the action, the executive nonetheless doing a massive new program.”

That, he said, “seems problematic.”

Kavanaugh noted that the administration was citing the national emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic as authority for the debt relief program. But he argued that some of the “finest moments in the court’s history” have been “pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power.”

The administration says that 26 million people have applied to have up to $20,000 in federal student loans forgiven under the plan.

“I’m confident the legal authority to carry that plan is there,” Biden said on Monday, at an event to mark Black History Month.

The president, who once doubted his own authority to broadly cancel student debt, first announced the program in August. Legal challenges quickly followed.

Republican-led states and lawmakers in Congress, as well as conservative legal interests, are lined up against the plan as a clear violation of Biden’s executive authority. Democratic-led states and liberal interest groups are backing the Democratic administration in urging the court to allow the plan to take effect.

Without it, loan defaults would dramatically increase when the pause on loan payments ends no later than this summer, the administration says. Payments were halted in 2020 as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The administration says a 2003 law, commonly known as the HEROES Act, allows the secretary of education to waive or modify the terms of federal student loans in connection with a national emergency. The law was primarily intended to keep service members from being worse off financially while they fought in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nebraska and other states that sued say the plan is not necessary to keep the rate of defaults roughly where it was before the pandemic. The 20 million borrowers who have their entire loans erased would get a “windfall” that will leave them better off than they were before the pandemic, the states say.

Dozens of borrowers came from across the country to camp out near the court on a soggy Monday evening in hopes of getting a seat for the arguments. Among them was Sinyetta Hill, who said that Biden’s plan would erase all but about $500 of the $20,000 or so she has in student loans.

“I was 18 when I signed up for college. I didn’t know it was going to be this big of a burden. No student should have to deal with this. No person should have to deal with this,” said Hill, 22, who plans to study law after she graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in May.