America's Talking - Federal Judges Block Biden’s Plan to End Student Loan Repayments

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Two federal judges on Monday ruled to block part of President Joe Biden's recent attempt to indefinitely postpone or cancel nearly half a trillion dollars in student loan debt. U.S. District Judge John Ross in Missouri and U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree in Kansas issued two separate rulings on Monday after Republican-led states' attorneys general filed a legal challenge to Biden's plan, which would have indefinitely postponed payments for a huge swath of borrowers, likely costing taxpayers about half a trillion dollars. Ross' ruling is a preliminary injunction halting part of Biden's plan until a ruling is made. The issue will likely be appealed and could move up through the courts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, chief content officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We were recording this on Friday, June 28th. Two federal judges this week ruled to block part of President Joe Biden's recent attempt to indefinitely postpone or cancel nearly half a trillion dollars in student loan debt. It would be just the latest ruling against Biden's student loan cancellation policies. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief.

Casey, you wrote about these two federal judges' decisions this week. Tell us more. Sure. I mean, when it comes to forgiving student loan debt, Biden is the little engine that could, right? He is really trying it one way or the other, this way, or that. He has been smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court pretty famously with national attention. when they ruled that his last attempt to just cancel student loan debt at such a broad scale, they said was, you know, he went too far because he tried to take a small provision in a bill

and expand it, basically changed the meaning of it to forgive student loans all around the country. And now this time around, he's been stopped once again, as you said, by two separate judges who, for different reasons, basically put this plan on hold. But, and this is no small amount of money, it'd be almost, you know, half a trillion dollars. Right. That would be canceled. And that word canceled is interesting, Dan. I mean, we know it's really not necessarily the most, necessarily the most accurate way to talk about this because that cost is really just transferred on to taxpayers.

Right. That money doesn't just disappear. It's somebody has to either not receive that payment or, you know, make that payment and is the U.S. taxpayers, right? And that's kind of the point besides the question of, does the president of, does the president? president have this authority, that is the consistent argument that the Biden administration is running up against. And the criticism is that, you know, regular Americans are paying the debt of college students who, who oftentimes have better paying jobs because they went to college, right? So the welder, the truck driver, the machinist is paying the college debt for the communications

major who works in a PR job in New York now, right? The lawyer, the doctor. Exactly. Yeah, lawyers and doctors studies have shown stand to benefit the most from these plans, actually. And so, of course, student loan debt is a huge problem in this country. The debt is overwhelming. There's a lot of questions about the cost of tuition, how inflated that is by these universities, which have huge endowments and then just run up these tuitions every year.

I think there's a lot of good questions that should be asked and looked into. But as for President Biden himself trying to single-handedly, you know, quote-unquote, solve this problem. He's once again being, you know, slapped down in the courts. And I'm not sure he's going to be able to really get anything substantive through before, at least before this election. Yeah, it was well over a year ago, Casey, that the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on one of his first student loan transfers, as you call them. We use, as you mentioned, I agree with you. We use the word cancellation, canceling student loan debt, but it's really a transfer of student loan debt from the borrower to the taxpayer.

But the Supreme Court rate in, but that did not deter Trump, or excuse me, deter Biden from putting in place other student loan transfer plans. Now you have two more judges weighing on saying, no, you can't do this. Do you think that's going to stop the Biden administration? Well, they're going to keep fighting an appeal. They're going to try to find other ways. They have successfully forgiven smaller chunks, I guess you call it, smaller portions of the large, you know, debt burden. They've done these small announcements where they're forgiving,

using federal programs, kind of changing them or tweaking them to forgive, you know, a few billion here, you know, a couple dozen billion there. But this plan is, you know, we're talking almost half a trillion. I think he's going to keep fighting it. I don't really expect him necessarily to be successful. Maybe he'll be partially successful. But, you know, and this is kind of moving into the political analysis side, Dan. But I don't think that Biden necessarily needs to be successful from his vantage point. I think what we've seen in this administration is a strategy of just announcing major policy changes from the White House that really appeal to the Democratic base, even though they're not constitutional. And so then when the courts overturn them,

Biden can say, well, I did everything I could. It's the courts that stopped me. We saw this, of course, with student loans. We saw it with the moratorium on evicting people. You know, Biden basically said, you can't evict anyone in the U.S. anymore. And that was really popular with part of his base, but then, of course, the courts overturned it. But by that point, he'd already scored the political points for making the announcement. So I think we're seeing that, even if, you know, the courts stopped this, it's like, man, Biden really tried to forgive our student debt. If he gets elected, maybe he'll find a way to do it. I think that's what he wants voters to think. He really wants the political credit. He did this. You know, this is an election year. And amongst all the

issues that are happening, there are many on which Biden has, you know, struggled on. We're talking about student debt and if Biden's going to be successful in forgiving student debt. So in a certain way, he is succeeding in keeping his efforts to forgive student debt, to remain in the conversation throughout almost his entire administration. Thank you for joining us today. Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.