Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student debt relief plan

It also creates fresh political challenges for the White House, which will face pressure from progressives to make good on Biden’s promised loan forgiveness despite the legal setback.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for all his Republican-appointed colleagues, rejected the Biden administration’s argument that it could enact mass debt forgiveness by using emergency “waiver” powers tied to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Roberts wrote that the HEROES Act “allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions” but not to “rewrite” the federal law on student loans “from the ground up.”

Roberts wrote that Biden’s plan amounts to “the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature” and that it stretches the pandemic-related emergency measure far beyond its logical bounds.

The Biden administration’s “comprehensive debt cancellation plan cannot fairly be called a waiver — it not only nullifies existing provisions, but augments and expands them dramatically,” Roberts wrote, calling the “economic and political significance” of the move “staggering by any measure.”

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent painted the court’s move as a troubling act of judicial overreach and said it fit a pattern of the court’s conservative majority intruding into actions that should be left to the political branches.

“The Court refuses to acknowledge the plain words of the HEROES Act. It declines to respect Congress’s decision to give broad emergency powers to the” secretary of education, Kagan wrote. “It does not let the political system, with its mechanisms of accountability, operate as normal. It makes itself the decisionmaker on, of all things, federal student-loan policy. And then, perchance, it wonders why it has only compounded the ‘sharp debates” in the country?”

The HEROES Act, passed in 2003, gave the Education Department special powers to change the typical rules of federal student loans to respond to a national emergency.

The law says that the secretary of education may “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” related to federal student loans “as may be necessary to ensure that” borrowers “are not placed in a worse position financially” because of a national emergency.

The Biden administration argued it needed to cancel student debt for most borrowers to avoid a surge of defaults when it resumes collecting payments for the first time after they’ve been paused during the pandemic for more than three years.