The legal fight over President Biden’s plan to forgive billions of dollars of student debt is one of the biggest cases on which the Supreme Court will rule in the next month.
have been raised about some of its members, especially conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. During oral arguments in the student loan cases in February, the conservative justices expressed doubts about whether the Biden administration had the authority to forgive huge swaths of student debt.
The court is weighing two cases, one brought by Missouri and five other states and the other brought by two people who hold student loan debt.and originally scheduled to take effect last fall — violated the Constitution and federal law, partly because it circumvented Congress, which they said has the sole power to create laws related to student loan forgiveness.for borrowers earning less than $125,000 a year . Pell Grant recipients, who are the majority of borrowers, would be eligible for an additional $10,000 in debt relief. The relief would have a significant impact, according to Alan Aja, a professor at Brooklyn College in New York who studies racial wealth disparities and signed a brief in support of the administration. People like his students, often members of minority groups from low-income backgrounds, would be more likely to finish their educations or consider more ambitious job opportunities or would be able to pay off other debt if Biden's plan goes into effect, he said.In defending the plan, the Biden administration cited a 2003 law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act, which says the government can provide relief to recipients of student loans when there is a “national emergency,” allowing it to act to ensure people are not in “a worse position financially” as a result of the emergency. The challengers say the language in the HEROES Act is not specific enough to authorize a proposal as broad as Biden’s plan, an argument that conservative justices appeared sympathetic to. It appears the only avenue for the Biden administration to prevail would be if the court were to conclude that the challengers do not have legal standing to bring their cases in the first place because they cannot show they would be harmed by the program. If the administration were to win the case, it would not remove all potential impediments to the plan’s moving forward, as other cases are pending in lower courts, but if the challengers do not have legal standing, it would suggest other people and entities bringing cases are unlikely to do so, either. Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, said a ruling for Biden on the standing issue"is likely to doom" all the other cases, although other people or entities who have yet to sue could fare better.In the affirmative action cases, the conservative justices indicated they were leaning toward ending the consideration of race in college admissions in legal challenges arising from the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. A ruling along those lines could lead to a significant drop in Black and Hispanic admissions at the country’s most selective colleges and accelerate changes in the criteria used to recruit students. Other cases the justices will rule on in the coming weeks include congressional redistricting disputes from
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