President Joe Biden answers questions from reporters at a post-election press conference on the White House on November ninth, 2022.
Nathan Posner | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ruled that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel lots of of billions of dollars in student loan debt was illegal and should be vacated, delivering a victory to conservative opponents of this system.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump in Fort Price, ruled in a lawsuit backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation on behalf of two borrowers.
The debt relief plan had already been temporarily blocked by the St. Louis-based eighth 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 very own lawsuit.
Biden’s plan has been the topic of several lawsuits by conservative state attorneys general and legal groups, though plaintiffs before Thursday had struggled to persuade courts they were harmed by it in such a way that they’ve standing to sue.
Pittman in a 26-page ruling wrote that the HEROES Act – a law that gives loan assistance to military personnel and that was relied upon by the Biden administration to enact the relief plan – didn’t authorize the $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.
“The Program is thus an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and should be vacated,” Pittman wrote.
The White House and representatives for the plaintiffs didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment.
The non-partisan 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 profit.
The plan, announced in August, calls for forgiving as much as $10,000 in student loan debt for borrowers making lower than $125,000 per yr, or $250,000 for married couples. Borrowers who received Pell Grants to profit lower-income college students may have as much as $20,000 of their debt canceled.
