First two years of lame duck gridlock, now this.
Late on Thursday, a federal judge in Texas ruled that 80-year-old (ok, fine 79 for another 10 days) President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt was unlawful and must be vacated, delivering a victory to conservative opponents of the program.
District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former Donald Trump in Fort Worth, ruled in a lawsuit backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation on behalf of two borrowers.
Pittman in a 26-page ruling wrote that the HEROES Act – a law that provides loan assistance to military personnel and that was relied upon by the Biden administration to enact the relief plan – did not authorize the $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.
“The Program is thus an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated,” Pittman wrote.
Biden’s debt relief plan was already temporarily blocked by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals while it considers a request by six Republican-led states to enjoin it while they appealed the dismissal of their own lawsuit.
Biden’s plan has been the subject of several lawsuits by conservative state attorneys general and legal groups, though plaintiffs before Thursday had struggled to convince courts they were harmed by it in such a way that they have standing to sue.
The Congressional Budget Office in September calculated the debt forgiveness would eliminate about $430 billion of the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt and that over 40 million people were eligible to benefit.
The plan, announced in August, calls for forgiving up to $10,000 in student loan debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 for married couples. Borrowers who received Pell Grants to benefit lower-income college students will have up to $20,000 of their debt canceled.
Of course, the Biden admin won’t let this aggression against socialism stand, and after it wins on appeal at one of the extremely liberal appeals courts across the country, a final decision is going right to the Supremes.
