Lawyer helps Biden student loan forgiveness plan probabilities

The federal government’s top Supreme Court lawyer could have saved President Joe Biden’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan from what experts considered all but certain defeat.

Experts lobbed praise on Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the lawyer who represented the Biden administration in front of the nine justices Tuesday.

“The Biden administration now seems more likely than to not win the cases,” said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

“Her preparation, poise and power were impressive,” Kantrowitz said.

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In contrast, the attorneys for plaintiffs against this system were lower than stellar, Kantrowitz said. “It was just like the difference between a star quarterback and two tiddlywinks players,” he said.

University of Illinois Chicago law professor Steven Schwinn agreed: “Prelogar knocked it out of the park.”

“I do think she could have influenced and even modified the pondering of two justices, perhaps more,” he added.

On Wednesday, Fordham law professor Jed Shugerman tweeted that he stays “struck by SG Elizabeth Prelogar’s good performance.”

“She could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat,” Shugerman wrote.

The nine justices considered two legal challenges to Biden’s plan to cancel as much as $20,000 in student debt for borrowers. Six GOP-led states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina — had brought one in every of the lawsuits, and the opposite was backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation, a conservative advocacy organization.

Prelogar argued that the president was acting squarely inside the law to avoid borrower distress during national emergencies and that plaintiffs had not shown in any way that they’d be harmed by the policy, which is often a requirement to determine so-called legal standing.

When the Biden administration rolled out its student loan forgiveness plan in August, it cited the Heroes Act of 2003 as its legal justification.

That law, which is a product of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, allows the U.S. secretary of education to “waive or modify” student loan programs to make sure borrowers aren’t left worse off due to a national emergency. Opponents of the president’s plan say canceling tons of of billions in dollars in student debt for tens of tens of millions of Americans goes far beyond the scope of the Heroes Act.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who kicked off the justices’ questioning of the Biden administration, looked as if it would echo that view.

“We’re talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans,” Thomas said. “How does that fit under the traditional understanding of ‘modifying'”?

Prelogar countered that the center of the availability’s purpose was to permit the secretary to make certain borrowers don’t suffer financially due to their loans during a crisis and that is exactly what the Biden administration’s policy does.

A top U.S. Department of Education official recently warned that the general public health crisis has caused considerable financial harm to student loan borrowers and that its debt cancellation plan is crucial to stave off a historic rise in delinquencies and defaults.

“It couldn’t have surprised Congress one bit that in response to hardship posed by a national emergency, the secretary might consider similarly providing discharge if that is what it takes to make certain borrowers don’t default,” Prelogar said.

Justice Elena Kagan agreed.

“That is an emergency provision,” Kagan said at one point, posing a hypothetical that the crisis had been an earthquake relatively than a pandemic.

“You do not think Congress wanted to offer … the secretary power to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, people have had their homes worn out, we will discharge their student loans”?