Threat To Democracy: Legal Experts Say Biden’s Skirting Of Supreme Court Decision On Student Loans With ‘Plan B’ Is Unconstitutional

(Fox News) Legal experts interviewed by Fox News Digital are expressing concern that President Joe Biden’s ongoing efforts to cancel student loans may be pushing the limits of his executive authority.

The experts said the Biden administration’s pursuit of mass student debt forgiveness may be more politically motivated than legally justified, warning that additional legal challenges may arise as a result. Biden’s first attempt to cancel student debt — which would have canceled roughly $430 billion in federal student loan balances and erased the debts of 20 million borrowers — was struck down last year by the Supreme Court.

 

“At a fundamental level, Congress is the one who should be making these decisions,” Anastasia Boden, the director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “These are decisions that entail billions of dollars in forgiveness and really threaten the viability of the entire student loan program because we know that forgiveness programs like this just tend to drive up the prices of education.”

Shortly after Biden’s original student debt forgiveness program was overturned by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision in June 2023, the president blasted the high court and accused it of misinterpreting the Constitution. The ruling, the president remarked, is “snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars in debt relief that was about to change their lives.”

However, the president has pursued a plan B strategy since the decision: a piecemeal approach, leveraging and expanding various existing Department of Education loan programs. Last week, Biden committed to “continuing to pursue an alternative path to deliver student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible.”

“They’ve become more careful,” said Michael Poon, an attorney at the public interest law firm Pacific Legal Foundation. “Now, they’re doing things through a normal administrative process, a normal rulemaking process. But many parts of their student loan cancelation efforts are still unlawful in the same way. They still are not authorized by statutes that Congress has passed.”

“It’s really just loan cancelation by another name,” Poon continued. “So, they’re expanding exemptions, they’re saying that certain parts of loans will just be forgiven outright. A lot of those parts of the program are still not authorized by statute. They’re just being a little more subtle about it and trying to keep it out of the court.”

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