Meet Alexander Taylor and Myra Brown, two people who definitely spent a lot of time in school reminding teachers that they forgot to assign homework.
Under President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, Alexander Taylor would have been entitled to $10,000, but because he did not receive Pell Grants, he was not eligible to have another $10,000 knocked off.
Myra Brown wasn't eligible for student loan forgiveness because her loans were commercially held and not in default. The lead plaintiff in the case that allowed a judge to strike down Biden's plan, Brown is not opposed to loan forgiveness when the loans being forgiven are her own. As the owner of a sign-making business, she was granted a $48,000 Payment Protection Act loan, of which $47,996 was forgiven in April of this year.
With the help of the Job Creators Network — of course it would be called that — these two filed a lawsuit arguing that the debt relief program violated the Administrative Procedures Act by not allowing for notice and comment, during which they and other members of the public could have expressed their issues with the program. So because they did not have the opportunity to air their grievances over not getting the debt relief they would have liked, they sued to make sure no one else would get any debt relief.
While lots of other right-wing astroturf groups had filed similar lawsuits hoping to get the program knocked down, none of the plaintiffs in those cases were found to have any standing.
They then brought the suit to Texas Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, who on Thursday found that the student loan relief program was illegal and blocked it from going into effect across the United States. Charming, no? His reasoning for this was that the Biden administration had no authority to issue the student debt relief and that it should have gone through Congress.
In Thursday's ruling, [Pittman] wrote that the program was a "complete usurpation" of congressional authority by the executive branch.
Pittman rejected the Biden administration's arguments that, in a law known as the HEROES Act, Congress had already given the president the power to erase student loan debts in a time of national emergency and that the COVID-19 pandemic is just such an emergency.
"In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone," Pittman wrote. "Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government."
The Biden administration is not, however, going to just let things go without a fight and has already appealed the ruling.
“For the 26 million borrowers who have already given the Department of Education the necessary information to be considered for debt relief – 16 million of whom have already been approved for relief – the Department will hold onto their information so it can quickly process their relief once we prevail in court,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement Thursday.
"We believe strongly that the Biden-Harris Student Debt Relief Plan is lawful and necessary to give borrowers and working families breathing room as they recover from the pandemic and to ensure they succeed when repayment restarts," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote on Twitter on Friday.
While things are up in the air, people will not be able to continue to apply for debt forgiveness, though previous applications will be held so that as soon as Pittman's ruling is overturned, the Debt Relief Program can kick into gear.
Luckily, the administration is still doing what it can to relieve debt for some borrowers.
Starting July 1st, 2023, borrowers who are disabled won't have to have their earnings reviewed for three years after they claim relief. Those who attended a school that closed suddenly will have their debt forgiven automatically after a year. The Education Department also streamlined a debt forgiveness program geared toward public service workers and simplified the process for qualifying for relief through income-driven repayment plans.
In addition, the administration has said it will discharge the debts of tens of thousands of students who attended predatory institutions like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute . And the new rules will make it easier for borrowers to sue universities that defrauded them. [...]
At the same time, the Education Department is set to forgive an additional $6 billion in student loan debt for borrowers who already applied for debt relief under the borrower defense program.
With things like this, it's better to try and fail than to not try at all. Americans (other than these two dopes) have made it resoundingly clear that they want student debt forgiveness to happen, which means that if it this program keeps getting blocked, pressure will be on Congress to come up with another one, and another one after that if that one doesn't work, and so on, until we find something that does.
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