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Joe Biden’s Student Debt Plan Didn’t Have to Be Such a Disaster [1]

['Eleni Schirmer', 'David Broder', 'Alexander Zaitchik', 'Alex N. Press', 'Matt Bruenig', 'Julia Rock', 'Nick French', 'David Sirota', 'Andrew Perez', 'An Interview With']

Date: 2023-09 

Eleni Schirmer

The fact that Biden was the president who canceled debt is in and of itself significant. That’s the result of a decade-old movement. Biden was not at all a champion of debt abolition of any kind; he came on board in the primaries, pushing for a $10,000 cancellation when Elizabeth Warren was for $50,000 and Bernie Sanders was for canceling everything. Biden was not a champion of this policy, yet pulled the trigger on it.

That’s important context when we think about what has been achieved in this moment: the movement made Biden do something he really didn’t want to do, and his hesitation and lack of resolve on the issue showed in how he implemented the program.

On August 24, 2022, Biden announced his plan to cancel $10–20,000 of student debt for eligible borrowers who earned under $125,000 a year annually. This was after weeks of advocates and experts and leaders of all kinds of organizations — from the AFL-CIO to the NAACP — calling on Biden to cancel debt automatically with no application. People were very clear that if the policy was to stick, it needed to be implemented without an application, for the relief to be automatically delivered to people’s accounts. Biden chose not to create the program that way. So on August 24, he announced cancellation and also that people would be able to apply for it.

The movement made Biden do something he really didn’t want to do, and his hesitation and lack of resolve on the issue showed in how he implemented the program.

It took fifty-two days for the application to be available. When it came out, it was basically like a spiffy Google Form that asked for people’s names, Social Security numbers, and birthdays. That was basically it. But what was crucial about those fifty-two days was that half a dozen lawsuits from Republican-controlled states were filed against the Biden administration over the program.

Most of the suits were dismissed, but two of them stuck. In these two suits, the plaintiffs were able to find sympathetic judges in right-wing courts in Texas and Missouri. Those judges sustained the plaintiff’s challenges and imposed a national injunction on Biden’s policy.

That brings us to where we’re at now. Actually, it was in November that Biden himself requested that SCOTUS intervene on this policy, which is interesting, because the normal course of action is that when a lower court makes a ruling on something like this, it takes weeks (if not months to years) for the Supreme Court to get involved. But Biden wanted to accelerate this process, probably because of the millions of households that are waiting for the relief. Because he didn’t, I suspect, think that the case would get a fair ruling in the lower courts. All but one of the judges on the Eighth Circuit Court of Missouri are Republican-appointed judges, and it’s really saying something that the case was going to have a better shot at getting a fair hearing from this Supreme Court than from these crackpot, conservative, lower-district courts.

That brings us to where we are now. On the one hand, we’re waiting on the Supreme Court to decide on the legality of Biden’s relief plan. But on the other hand, it never should have come to the Supreme Court to begin with. Had Biden actually canceled debt and then told America afterward, “Hey guys, check your accounts. You’ll see you’ve been credited $10–20,000,” there no doubt would’ve been lawsuits, but the legal challenge of trying to reimpose a debt that’s already been canceled is more significant than one trying to stop it from happening in the first place.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2023/06/joe-biden-student-loan-debt-relief-supreme-court-mohela

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