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Scholars, attorneys and advocates urge Supreme Court to block GOP efforts to tank student debt relief
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Scholars, attorneys and advocates urge Supreme Court to block GOP efforts to tank student debt relief
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A broad coalition of legal scholars, attorneys, labor unions, and advocates filed amicus briefs this week imploring the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program, which lower courts have put on hold as Republican officials and right-wing groups attempt to block relief for tens of millions of borrowers.
The series of filings includes a 32-page brief led by the founders of the Student Loan Law Initiative, a project of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and the Student Borrower Protection Center. The law scholars argue that the Biden administration is perfectly within its right to forgive student loan debt “because Congress, through the plain language of the relevant statute, delegated precisely the authority exercised here.”
“The relevant statutory text is clear as sunlight,” the brief reads. “The HEROES Act of 2003 authorizes the secretary of education to ‘waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under [T]itle IV of the [Higher Education] Act [of 1965] as the secretary deems necessary in connection with a… national emergency.’ That is exactly what the secretary did here.”
Former U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the lead author of the HEROES Act, submitted an amicus brief on Tuesday echoing that assessment.
“In short, the HEROES Act permits the reduction or elimination of a student borrower’s debt burden by allowing the secretary to ‘relinquish’ or ‘make more moderate’ the provisions that require repayment of student loans,” Miller wrote. “This understanding of ‘waive’ and ‘modify’ aligns with the way that agencies have interpreted these terms in similar statutory provisions.”
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