trumpanzees is so stupid...
You can thank trump for this "illegal" "unconstitutional" action by Biden... 🤣
https://www.vox.com/2022/8/24/23319967/student-loan-payments-debt-forgiveness-biden
Is this even legal? Is there anything Biden’s political opponents can do to stop him?
Maybe? And, maybe? The Higher Education Act is almost 60 years old, and no president has ever done anything like this before.
The Trump administration’s 2020 decision to suspend all federal student loan payments, which Biden has extended multiple times, came from a separate law granting the president powers during a national emergency like a pandemic. Biden is
citing that authority for the new loan forgiveness plan.
There are a host of constitutional provisions, federal laws, and legal precedents that obligate federal agencies to collect on outstanding debts. Skeptics also point out that Congress has enacted a number of specific student loan forgiveness programs, including plans that eliminate remaining debt after 20 years of payments or 10 years of public service. The administration’s recent
decision to wipe out debt for students who attended the notorious for-profit Corinthian Colleges was based on a discrete legal provision meant to protect students who were defrauded by their college.
If Congress has specifically decided when loans can be forgiven, the thinking goes, it has also, by implication, decided that loans can’t be forgiven under other circumstances. Shortly before leaving office, Trump administration lawyers issued a memorandum asserting that the Department of Education does not have the authority to unilaterally forgive all the loans. But the Biden administration is not legally bound by that memo, and other legal scholars have
argued that the Department of Education has the power to unilaterally forgive loans.
Opponents of debt forgiveness will also have to get over a considerable legal hurdle called “standing,” which means that not just anyone can file a lawsuit claiming that an executive order is illegal. You have to demonstrate that you would be personally harmed by the action. Merely being a taxpayer who implicitly owes a percentage of the national debt doesn’t count.
Because the benefits of debt forgiveness are specific and possible harms, such as the risk that loan forgiveness would worsen inflation, are generalized, few people or organizations can plausibly claim standing. Those that might include the organizations that the Department of Education hires to service loans, since they get paid per borrower and forgiveness will reduce the number of borrowers to service. The “guarantee agencies” that hold many of the old non-Direct loans that would be refinanced are also candidates.
That said, federal judges have been known to take an expansive view of standing if they really don’t like the action being challenged. In June, the Supreme Court’s
West Virginia v. EPA decision placed new limits on the ability of federal agencies to expansively interpret their authority in matters of “vast economic and political significance.” The ultimate fate of executive loan forgiveness in the federal courts remains a big unknown.