The Biden administration is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court in a bid to save his student debt relief plan, The Associated Press reports.
A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas last week struck down Biden’s plan to forgive student debt, prompting the Education Department to shut down applications for the program.
Judge Mark Pittman called the program an “unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power.”
“Whether the Program constitutes good public policy is not the role of this Court to determine,” he wrote, calling it one of “the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.”
“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone. Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government,” Pittman wrote.
Second court:
A federal appeals court on Monday also blocked the plan in response to a lawsuit from six Republican-led states, which argued they would face a “number of ongoing financial harms” if the loans are forgiven.
The court found that at least one of the states, Missouri, could face financial harm because it’s Higher Educational Loan Authority could suffer a financial blow "if a substantial portion of its accounts are no longer active."
SCOTUS appeal:
The Justice Department plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.
“We anticipate there could be an historically large increase in the amount of federal student loan delinquency and defaults as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Education Undersecretary James Kvaal said in a Tuesday filing. “This could result in one of the harms that the one-time student loan debt relief program was intended to avoid.”
The department said it is “examining all available options” but warned that extending the pause on student debt payments could cost the government “several billion dollars a month in unrecovered loan revenue.”
