“As the legal vulnerability has become clearer and clearer, the White House has been making increasingly firm plans to extend the loan repayment pause,” an unnamed source told the Post. “The extension we’re likely to see is meant to make sure borrowers don’t have the rug pulled out from under them, rather than an indefinite replacement for loan forgiveness.”
If that statement suggests that the White House didn’t anticipate endless lawsuits and Republican judges who would rule against the program … I’m at a loss, because that was obviously going to happen. But extending the moratorium will at least keep people from being slammed in the immediate future.
The Student Borrower Protection Center’s Michael Pierce, a deputy assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Obama, called on the Biden administration to “make it clear that the student loan system will remain shut off as long as these partisan legal challenges persist.” That would be one to do it, for sure. “Hey guys, as long as you’re suing to block us from canceling some debt for some borrowers, no one has to pay. How are you feeling about those lawsuits now?”
Law professor Steve Vladeck sharply criticized the Eighth Circuit’s stay of the program. “It applies the wrong standard by conflating an emergency application w/ a preliminary injunction, and on the merits, says only that the Q is ‘substantial,’” he tweeted. He went on to call it “just the latest example of a growing phenomenon,” with “Judges using procedural orders (and ignoring procedural obstacles) to block government policies to which they object, but without specifically explaining why those policies are unlawful.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren laid out the political contrast in the Republican lawsuits against Biden’s debt relief plan. “This is one of the clearest differences between Democrats and Republicans,” she said on NBC News. “Democrats, led by Joe Biden, are out there saying, ‘We hear you on what it’s like to get crushed by student loan debt. We know what that means.’ And so we’re here to try to help. The Republicans—they got nothing. They say no, the only people that they’re willing to fight for are billionaires and billionaire corporations and conspiracy theorists. Democrats fight for working people, and when we fight for working people, we win.”
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has twice dismissed other challenges to the student debt relief program.
The Biden administration is pressing on in the courts.
Laura Clawson
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