Former Vice President of the US Mike Pence proclaims that he’s running for President of the US within the 2024 Election in Ankeny, Iowa, on June 07, 2023.
Kyle Mazza | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Republican leaders and presidential candidates filed in to applaud Friday’s Supreme Court decision striking down President Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.
“I’m honored to have played a job in appointing three of the justices that ensured today’s welcomed decision,” said former Vice President Mike Pence, who served under Donald Trump within the White House and is now competing against him within the Republican presidential primary.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., one other presidential contender, called the loan forgiveness plan an “illegal and immoral” bid to “transfer student debt to taxpayers.”
“Should you take out a loan, you pay it back,” Scott said in a press release.
Biden’s debt-forgiveness effort would have canceled as much as $20,000 in student loans for tens of millions of individual borrowers, at an estimated cost of $400 billion.
Payments on those loans, which had been paused for greater than three years by each the Trump and Biden administrations, are set to resume in October.
The 6-3 ruling, which split the conservative-majority court along ideological lines, sawed off a serious plank of Biden’s sweeping agenda to offer relief for Americans impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s obviously a blow to the administration,” Katharine Meyer, a education policy expert and fellow on the Brookings Institution, said in an interview Friday.
Meyer noted, nonetheless, that she doesn’t expect the ruling will mark an end to the efforts to forgive student loan debt.
Biden is about to deliver an address Friday afternoon. “This fight is not over,” his official Twitter account vowed.
Pence and others within the GOP, including the Republican National Committee, condemned the president’s plan as a subsidy for wealthy college graduates, a category that tends to lean Democratic.
But most borrowers don’t fit into that group: One-third of them owe lower than $10,000, and one other 20% owe between $10,000 and $20,000, based on data last 12 months from The Washington Post.
“The overwhelming majority of borrowers are those who have taken out fairly small loans, and a big share of them never earned a university degree,” Meyer said. “Loads of the individuals who would have benefited in a roundabout way from this policy are lower-income Americans.”
Other Republicans have recommend alternative plans for addressing the country’s burgeoning student loan debt.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the important GOP primary rival to Trump, has proposed putting universities on the hook when their students default on their debt. Earlier this month, a gaggle of Senate Republicans recommend a package of bills aimed to handle “skyrocketing” higher education costs.
Canceling student debt is a preferred idea: Polls have shown that almost all registered voters support not less than some type of loan forgiveness.
As of 1 p.m. ET on Friday, neither Trump nor DeSantis had weighed in on the ruling.
