On Friday, the Supreme Court dashed President Biden’s student loan debt cancellation program, striking down a popular policy that was announced to much fanfare in August of last year. A flagship Biden accomplishment, one often cited as part of Democrats’ shock overperformance in the 2022 midterm elections, it would have delivered between $10,000 and $20,000 of debt relief to 43 million Americans with student loan debt.
The announcement came in two separate decisions. The first, Department of Education v. Brown, was so glaringly weak that even this right-wing court couldn’t find a way to justify it. In Brown, the plaintiffs claimed injury based on the fact that they were denied a public comment period to ask for more relief. Thus, they said, the remedy was to toss out the entire loan forgiveness program for everyone. The court unanimously held that the plaintiffs lacked standing, but it’s borderline scandalous that the case even made it all the way to the Supreme Court in the first place.
The second decision, Biden v. Nebraska, was what the court used to kill off the debt relief program in a 6–3 decision. The case was barely stronger than Brown. Six red states teamed up to bring a case against the student relief program by focusing on the supposed plight of a Missouri state loan servicer called MOHELA. The alleged injury in the case was based on the notion that MOHELA would lose revenue as a result of debt cancellation, and therefore would eventually be unable to repay money into a Missouri state school fund.
But there were gaping holes in that argument. For one thing, MOHELA did not file, solicit, or participate in the case at all. MOHELA executives “were not involved with the decision of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office to file for the preliminary injunction in federal court,” according to a letter sent by MOHELA to Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush. The group found out about the case—in which they were the central party—via news coverage.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg: As David Dayen wrote in the American Prospect, MOHELA hadn’t made payments for the last 15 years into the school fund it was allegedly possibly going to be prevented from keeping afloat. And according to MOHELA’s own financial documents, the loan servicer had no plans to pay into it in the future.
Still, as this session has shown repeatedly, the Supreme Court won’t let the facts get in the way of its agenda-setting.
There’s no doubt the court was looking for any opportunity to kill Biden’s flagship program, but Democrats also played a major role in their own undoing. Roberts not only objected to the Biden team’s interpretation of the law, the chief justice cited public comments from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying she didn’t believe Biden had unilateral authority to erase student debt as part of his argument.
The legal justification put forward by the Biden team revolved around the HEROES Act, a law passed in 2003. The White House reasoning was that COVID put many borrowers in a worse financial position, preventing them from paying off loans. Thus, certain repayment requirements for a certain class of borrowers—those whose income was below $125,000—could be waived or modified.
Chief Justice Roberts did not find that persuasive. He also cited Biden’s remarks that he believed “the pandemic [was] over” during summer 2022 to help make his case. Biden’s ending of the COVID state of emergency while the student loan relief program was still tied up in court likely didn’t help; ending the student debt payment pause as part of the debt ceiling deal probably hurt, too.
Among the problems was the program’s rollout, which opened the door for this decision in the first place. When the program was announced in late August 2022, it came with this stipulation: “No individual making more than $125,000 or household making more than $250,000—the top 5% of incomes in the United States—will receive relief.”
That meant the White House had to put together a screening process, code a website, and process the applications to verify eligibility. None of that was in place when the relief program was announced, and though the White House moved relatively quickly, two months elapsed before the applications were processed.
Those months proved decisive. It was a window of time that gave the conservative judicial apparatus time to kick into high gear, desperately seeking out plaintiffs and some semblance of a legal theory to prevent the aid from going into effect while shopping around for favorable judges and districts to get those cases up to the Supreme Court.
The best they could come up with were Brown and Missouri, both feeble cases by any measure, but enough in the end for this court, in its activist conservative state, to get the job done. The program was frozen before any debt relief went out the door. Still, while it’s never safe to assume that this court wouldn’t do something even more radical, it’s unlikely they would have reinstated people’s already forgiven debts in their decision today if it had been fully accomplished.
If the administration had taken seriously the nature of the current-day court, it could have implemented relief on the day the program was announced and just applied it to everyone with debt. It’s not exactly clear how many “undeserving” rich debtors would have gotten relief in that instance: The White House’s guidance said that 43 million Americans would benefit from their program, while the total number of Americans with student loans hovered around 45 million. According to another estimate, 97 percent of student loan borrowers are low- or middle-income. Losing relief for 43 million to prevent 2 million high earners from getting aid for fear of the political blowback was, frankly, a bit silly.
Now, the political consequences of not being able to deliver on this pledge are calamitous. Biden’s support among young voters is perilously low; it’s sinking desperately with Black and Latino voters as well. One recent focus group found Hispanic voters saying that they could not point to one single thing Biden had done to improve their lives. Those demographics are among the most likely to be burdened with student debt, a major reason the NAACP called out the Biden administration publicly over its decision to end the payment pause two weeks ago. By some estimates, 90 percent of Black students and 72 percent of Latino students have student loans.
Student debt cancellation is extremely popular: Over 60 percent of likely voters support the Biden administration’s plan to provide up to $20,000 in student loan debt relief, according to recent polling from Data for Progress and the Student Borrower Protection Center. For a desperately unpopular president, this program—and real results—could be decisive in making up Biden’s margin in 2024.
The good news is there are still avenues to be pursued. There are other laws, like the Higher Education Act of 1965, which give the administration authority to simply not collect federal student loan payments. (That process is called “settlement and compromise.”) But the options that have been floated internally, like a muscled-up income-driven repayment program, are pitiful and politically inscrutable in comparison to the straightforward act of debt cancellation.
“The fight is not over,” Biden said in a statement after the Supreme Court ruling on Friday. Citing disappointment with the decision, the statement said: “I will stop at nothing to find other ways to deliver relief to hard-working middle-class families.”
But the job for Biden only gets more difficult from here. If he wants to run a political campaign on anything resembling student loan debt cancellation, he’s going to have to get creative, aggressive, and real about the Supreme Court in a way he hasn’t before.