Following the pattern established over the last year of ignoring both legal precedent and nullifying congressional legislation, the Supreme Court’s right-wing extremist majority blocked President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, denying relief to roughly 40 million Americans who stood to have from $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt cancelled.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, observed that the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on student loans and affirmative action show that the right-wing majority is ignoring the will of elected officials and “beginning to assume the power of a legislature … signaling a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court.”
Within hours of high court’s ruling, President Biden announced he’ll take a new path to honor his campaign pledge to provide student debt relief. Biden’s new approach will rely on the 1965 Higher Education Act that grants the secretary of education the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loans. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Kristin McGuire, executive director of the group Young Invincibles. Here she slams the Supreme Court’s ruling that blocked the president’s debt relief plan, and discusses her group’s determination to fix the unjust burden of student debt on young people.
KRISTIN MCGUIRE: We’ve always maintained at Young Invincibles that this debt cancellation under the Heroes (Act of 2003) was legal, because it did give the authority to waive or modify student loan provisions in response to certain conditions. And clearly the pandemic was one of those conditions. We are upset that the economic security of over 40 million Americans became so heavily politicized that the Supreme Court was unable to rule on behalf of the people. So I think when we talk about our initial reactions, it’s the fact that an issue that should not have been politicized became so very politicized that we ruled against the voice of the people.
SCOTT HARRIS: Given the fact that your organization, Young Invincibles focuses on young adults and their issues, tell us about the impact especially on young adults. There are many Americans that continue to carry student debt well into their 60S, some into their 70S, of course, but the impact of this debt on young adults as President Biden recently said, it delays the start of careers of families of purchasing a house. Just innumerable things. Tell us more.
KRISTIN MCGUIRE: Sure. So, a concept that we like to call delayed adulthood, where young people graduate college and in any other situation, we would expect young adults to be able to graduate college, go to their first job, maybe even have their first home and start their families. And what we’re seeing because of this debt is that they are not entering what we would traditionally call adulthood milestones. So when we hear the rumors and the snickers and the memes that Gen Z doesn’t want to move from their parents’ home, it’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. And so what we’re seeing is young people not starting their families at the same rate or at the same age as they have in previous generations. They also are not earning as much money as previous generations did. You know, we released a paper, a report called Financial Health of Young America and it says that young people today have less wealth and income than than when their parents did at the same age.
SCOTT HARRIS: Kristin, many on the right Republicans, conservatives, and a whole slew of political activists of the right often criticize the plan to offer student debt relief. And they talk about it as a giveaway to law and medical school graduates that blue-collar plumbers and construction workers would pay for. And that’s kind of the line of the day from these folks. How do you respond to such criticism?
KRISTIN MCGUIRE: I think there’s a couple of ways to respond. First I want to say that Young Invincible is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization. So we don’t really participate in the partisan conversations, but we do deal with facts and data. And the data simply does not support that. Student loan cancellation would only have benefited folks who make under $125,000 a year. So that would not be the rich and elite doctors and lawyers. That would be working class Americans who are in the middle class that our president Joe Biden said he wanted to shore up and support and expand. Those would’ve been the people who would have been benefited from the student loan cancellation.
SCOTT HARRIS: Now, President Biden responded in a brief talk after this Supreme Court ruling blocking his plan for student debt relief was handed down under the authority of something called the Higher Education Act of 1965. Biden talked about it being a slower route toward relief. What can you tell us about this plan by the Biden administration to continue to pursue a student debt relief?
KRISTIN MCGUIRE: Sure. And this plan would go through a process that is called negotiated rulemaking, and they actually released the notification for the committee in public comment when he made that announcement. This route will take anywhere from eight months to over a year to lead to the final pathway of debt cancellation. It’s unclear which communities or what the amount will be and that’s why it has to go through this process of negotiated rulemaking where those terms would be outlined. So we don’t have a lot of details there but it is a viable pathway, from what we can gather.
However, it’s not a quick pathway and I think it’s important to note that that student borrowers deserve quick action that’s not loaded with bureaucracy and red tape. And I think that student borrowers, all 40-million plus have been more than patient. So we do hope that the president can have a sense of urgency along with the Department of Education to quicken this process.
SCOTT HARRIS: There are some advocates for student debt relief who are critical of the Biden administration for not taking this approach under the Higher Education Act earlier, thinking that the route they did take was vulnerable to the Supreme Court action. I guess there’s no telling whether there’ll be future challenges to this plan B, but what is your view on President Biden and his follow through on his campaign pledge to cancel student debt? Has he been straight up, you think? Or are there other things that he should have and could have done?
KRISTIN MCGUIRE: So, here’s our take. We’ve been advocating for debt cancellation for quite some time. President Biden is the first president to at least attempt to make good on this promise. Now, we know that he can do more than attempt and perhaps there were some critics saying he should have used HEA authorization, beforehand, but the Heroes Act was a viable pathway. And again, when we’re thinking about partisan politics, the real issue here is ensuring that we can center the American people, center our next generation of leaders. Invest in our country by investing in higher education. And I think that’s the real problem that we should be discussing.
Find more information about the fight for student debt relief by visiting the Young Invincibles at younginvincibles.org, the Student Debt Crisis Center at studentdebtcrisis.org, the Debt Collective at debtcollective.org and Strike Debt at strikedebt.org.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Kristin McGuire (14:48) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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