The Supreme Court struck down President Biden‘s student loan forgiveness plan, ruling Friday that those kinds of big policy questions must be left to Congress, not to executive action.
The 6-3 ruling could have massive political and financial implications, with millions of borrowers and $400 billion worth of taxpayers’ money involved.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing the key opinion, said the law Mr. Biden cited for claiming the power to forgive loans, which was passed in the wake of 9/11 and aimed at helping members of the military afford college, can’t be stretched as far as the president believes.
“Congress did not unanimously pass the HEROES Act with such power in mind,” he wrote.
He said that’s not a statement on the wisdom of the forgiveness, but rather a legal judgment on Mr. Biden‘s claims of power.
“The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it,” he wrote.
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Mr. Biden said the ruling won’t be the last word.
“The fight is not over,” he said in a statement that lamented the court’s treatment of his original idea. “I believe that the Court’s decision to strike down our student debt relief plan is wrong. But I will stop at nothing to find other ways to deliver relief to hard-working middle-class families.”
Dissenting from Friday’s ruling were the court’s three Democrat-appointed members, who said they believed Congress did want the administration to be able to forgive.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing the dissent, said in picking apart Congress’s law and rejecting the administration’s interpretation the high court was trying to set policy, not rule on law.
“That is no proper role for a court. And it is a danger to a democratic order,” she wrote.
At issue is what’s become known as the Major Questions Doctrine. That’s a sense, championed chiefly by conservatives, that Congress cannot delegate big decisions to the president without explicitly saying so.
SEE ALSO: Biden points to Republican ‘hypocrisy’ after Supreme Court kills student debt-relief plan
Chief Justice Roberts said that didn’t happen in this case.
The 2003 law, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students or HEROES Act contained a provision that allowed the Education Department to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” in times of war or national emergency.
It applied to active-duty military and National Guard troops deployed for a war or national emergency, as well as others living or working in a declared disaster or who suffered economic hardship because of war or emergency.
Mr. Biden said the now-expired COVID-19 pandemic was such an emergency, and said the forgiveness amounted to a modification of loans in line with what the law envisioned.
Chief Justice Roberts said such massive forgiveness strains the definition of the words “waive” and “modify.”
“What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by ‘waiving’ provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text,” he wrote.
To prove his point, the chief justice even cited then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who in 2021 said Mr. Biden couldn’t do a forgiveness: “He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” Mrs. Pelosi said.
Mr. Biden‘s plan would have canceled up to $20,000 of a borrower’s student loan debt.
The idea was wildly popular with younger voters, who have complained about growing financial burdens that they say make it tougher to get ahead compared with what their parents and grandparents faced. Some compared the loan bailout to the kind of corporate bailouts the government pursued in the 2008 Wall Street collapse and again during the pandemic.
Total student loan debt is roughly $1.75 trillion. Mr. Biden‘s forgiveness plan covers about $400 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Opponents argued that the benefits will go mostly to people from higher-income families, who least need the forgiveness. Studies vary in their exact assessments, though all of them show wealthy households collecting a significant share of the benefit.
The administration figured more than 40 million borrowers were eligible for the plan, and 26 million had already applied as of early this year.
The forgiveness plan had been on hold while the courts considered the case.
Mr. Biden is already working on a backup plan.
The Education Department has proposed a new regulation that would lower repayments based on income levels, cutting them from 10% of discretionary monthly income to 5%. The CBO estimated the plan would cost $230 billion.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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