White House pushes forward on student loan forgiveness in wake of SCOTUS ruling

President Joe Biden vowed Friday that his administration will continue to pursue student loan forgiveness in the wake of a ruling from the Supreme Court invalidating his proposal to forgive student loans owed to the federal government.

In a speech at the White House Friday afternoon, Biden said he was "not going to stop fighting to deliver borrowers what they need, particularly those at the bottom end of the economic scale" and would use the Higher Education Act to allow the Department of Education to release and waive loans. Biden also said the administration would create a "ramp repayment program" to help borrowers struggling to pay their loans when payments resume this fall.

Biden also criticized Republicans for what he called their "hypocrisy" and said the Supreme Court "misinterpreted the Constitution" in ruling against his debt relief plan.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student debt per person owed to the federal government, ruling in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines that the president could not use emergency “waiver” powers tied to the Covid-19 pandemic to implement massive debt forgiveness. The Biden administration had used the HEROES Act, a bill passed in 2003 in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that gives the Education Department special powers to change the typical rules of federal student loans to respond to a national emergency.

The HEROES Act, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in an opinion with the other five conservative justices, “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 further said that the plan stretches the pandemic-related emergency measure far beyond its logical bounds.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the majority had overreached and inserted itself into the political process. “The Court refuses to acknowledge the plain words of the HEROES Act” and “declines to respect Congress’s decision to give broad emergency powers to the” secretary of Education, Kagan wrote, leaving the secretary of Education “powerless” as a result.

The ruling on the president’s debt forgiveness plan represents a political defeat for Biden, who ran on the promise of providing relief to Americans with significant outstanding student loan debt. It also heightens a time crunch for the administration, which faces a looming deadline this fall when student loan payments, which have been suspended since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, are set to resume.