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The Supreme Court has struck down President Biden’s expansive federal student loan plan — putting to bed a $400 billion gambit that would have ultimately done little to address the causes of increasing college debt.
The proposal was doomed from the outset, having been based upon an overly generous reading of the HEROES Act, a 9/11-era law designed to let the federal government relieve student debt burdens for soldiers who left college to enter active military service.
While the Education Department claimed that the law’s provisions allowed it to “waive or modify” student loan plans during the COVID-19 “national emergency,” the court disagreed.
“The Secretary’s plan has ‘modified’ the cited provisions only in the same sense that “the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility,’ ” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote flatly in his majority opinion. “It has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.”
Biden’s plan is best thought of as a partisan power grab aimed a ginning up support as the 2022 midterms neared — rather than as a serious solution to the nation’s student debt problem.
The plan would have hardly even reduced the student debt burden in the short term.
