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Biden’s student debt plan hangs in balance as major Supreme Court rulings loom
WASHINGTON — For months, the Biden administration’s ambitious plan to discharge billions of dollars of student loan debt has been on ice, blocked by lower courts, its fate left in the hands of skeptical conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
The stakes are high, with 43 million people eligible for up to $20,000 in debt relief. The total cost if the program ever goes into effect has been calculated at more than $400 billion, with the administration estimating that 20 million people would have all of their remaining student loan debt canceled.
The proposal is also important politically to President Joe Biden, as tackling student loan debt was a key pledge he made on the campaign trail in 2020 to energize younger voters.
But with a conservative-majority Supreme Court suspicious of broad assertions of executive power, Biden’s plan faces a significant hurdle.
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Looming Supreme Court affirmative action ruling has elite colleges on edge
Late June is normally a peaceful time on college campuses. Not this year.
On Zoom calls, in working groups and in text chains, officials at elite schools are anxiously preparing. Within days, the Supreme Court could bar them from considering race as a factor in the admissions process.
“The truth is many colleges and universities have been preparing for this day for a long time,” Danielle Holley, incoming president of Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts, said in an interview.
Holley, who was dean of the Howard University School of Law for the last nine years, is well versed in the legal arguments for and against using race in college admissions. The daughter of two academics, she has been studying the case law since she was a young law student. Now, she’s focused on the practical implications of what the justices might do.
“Race is a critical part of how we do our work in higher education,” she said. “We don’t want tools taken away from us or our hands tied behind our back. … I’m extremely worried.”
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How the Supreme Court made it harder to overturn the 2024 election
The Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday in a major election case was bad news for John Eastman — a lawyer aligned with Donald Trump who pushed a novel legal theory in his bid to overturn the 2020 election.
Tuesday’s 6-3 ruling rejected a sweeping version of what has been dubbed the “independent state legislature theory,” which argues that state legislatures have almost unfettered powers to implement election law, free even of the normal legal review carried out by state courts.
Eastman, a conservative lawyer, had embraced the theory as part of his widely discredited argument that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to refuse to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
It failed then, and the Supreme Court’s new ruling made it clear that it and similar far-fetched theories will not fly in the 2024 election either.
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