Supreme Court takes 2nd Biden student loan relief challenge

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to listen to arguments in a second case difficult the legality of the Biden administration’s ambitious student loan relief program.

The case, originally filed in Texas, might be argued in February before the Supreme Court together with the primary case the court accepted.

The Biden administration had asked the Supreme Court to listen to each cases if it didn’t conform to reverse injunctions issued by two separate federal appeals courts last month, which blocked the scholar loan relief program from going into effect.

The administration has said President Joe Biden’s plan may gain advantage greater than 40 million borrowers by forgiving as much as $20,000 in debt. It will cancel a whole bunch of billions of dollars in federal debt owed by borrowers.

The Supreme Court, when it accepted the primary case on Dec. 1, declined to lift the orders blocking this system from taking and processing applications.

The Education Department prolonged a loan repayment pause after the appeals courts issued the nationwide injunctions. That pause will proceed until June, or until the Supreme Court rules on this system’s legality.

Within the case the Supreme Court accepted Monday, two plaintiffs, Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor, sued the Education Department in U.S. District Court in Texas, claiming the administration improperly implemented the debt relief plan without notifying the general public about it or offering a probability to comment on it.

Each Brown and Taylor have student loans.

Brown “is ineligible for relief under the plan because her loans are held by business entities reasonably than the [Education] Department,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar of the Justice Department wrote in her application to the Supreme Court requesting it lift an injunction.

“Taylor is eligible for $10,000 in relief, but not for $20,000, because he didn’t receive a Pell Grant,” Prelogar wrote.

The federal judge who had the case rejected the claim that the Education Department was obligated to have a notice-and-comment period before adopting the plan. However the judge ruled that this system exceeded the statutory authority of the secretary of Education, and consequently blocked the plan from taking effect.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied the Justice Department’s request to lift that injunction because it appealed the judge’s order.

In the primary case the Supreme Court accepted for oral argument, six Republican-led states challenged the debt relief program on claims that it will threaten their future tax revenues. Additionally they argued the plan circumvented congressional authority.

In that case, a federal district judge in Missouri had denied the states’ request to issue an injunction against this system, finding that not one of the states had legal standing to bring their lawsuit. However the eighth Circuit Court of Appeals later issued a nationwide injunction against the plan pending the end result of an appeal of that lower-court ruling.

The case the Supreme Court accepted Monday is Department of Education, et al., v. Myra Brown, et al, docket number 22A489.

The primary case accepted by the court difficult the debt relief program is Biden v. Nebraska, docket number 22-506.