President Joe Biden insisted Friday that “this fight is not over” after the Supreme Court struck down his $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan
President Joe Biden insisted Friday that “this fight is not over” after the Supreme Court struck down his $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan. Biden blamed Republicans’ opposition, aiming to direct the ire of millions of borrowers toward them rather than his own party in next year’s elections.
The president planned an afternoon address to lay out a series of actions to provide continued relief to 43 million student loan borrowers, and in the meantime tried to stay on the political offensive against the GOP.
“The hypocrisy of Republican elected officials is stunning,” Biden said in a statement. “They had no problem with billions in pandemic-related loans to businesses – including hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars for their own businesses. And those loans were forgiven. But when it came to providing relief to millions of hard-working Americans, they did everything in their power to stop it.”
Electoral consequences aside, progressive Democrats in Congress and activists clamored for the White House to offer a swift and substantial response to the court’s decision. Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center, said the responsibility falls “squarely” on Biden’s shoulders.
“The president possesses the power, and must summon the will, to secure the essential relief that families across the nation desperately need,” Abrams said in a statement.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of her party’s leading voices on the left, said, “The president has more tools to cancel student debt — and he must use them.»
The GOP has long argued that repaying the student loans is a fairness issue, and they celebrated the ruling. Betsy DeVos, who served as secretary of education under President Donald Trump, called Biden’s original plan “deeply unfair to the majority of Americans who don’t have student loans.”
Republicans now seeking their party’s 2024 presidential nomination lined up to applaud the ruling, with former Vice President Mike Pence saying he was “pleased that the court struck down the radical left’s effort to use the money of taxpayers who played by the rules and repaid their debts in order to cancel the debt of bankers and lawyers in New York, San Francisco, and Washington.
