The Supreme Court of the United States has revoked this Friday the program promoted by the president of the country, Joe Biden, to alleviate student debt university students considering that it is an abuse of their powers without the permission of Congress.
The ruling, by six votes in favor to three against, in line with the court’s conservative majority, represents a blow to one of the main educational initiatives of the White House; one that some 43 million Americans would have taken advantage of.
Biden has indicated in a statement published by the White House that the decision of the Supreme is “disappointing” and “wrong“, though he won’t stop until he finds “other ways to bring some economic relief to working middle-class families.”
“The hypocrisy of Republican officials is staggering. They had no problem with the billions in business loans during the pandemic (…) but when it comes to providing some relief to millions of American workers, they do everything possible to stop the process,” he said.
The US president has stressed that 90 percent of the beneficiaries of the debt program earn less than $75,000 a year. “I will give more details about everything my Administration has done to help students and the next steps my Administration will take in this regard,” she said.
One of these measures could be the one proposed this Friday by the progressive congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez, who has warned after learning of the ruling that the verdict “does not incapacitate Biden to continue with new initiatives to alleviate the debt” and has recommended that the president resort to the so-called Higher Education Act, a legal framework that could facilitate these exemptions to the students.
The plan, which trained those affected to cancel up to 20,000 dollars of debt for studies and which would have cost more than 400,000 million dollars (about 360,000 million euros) to the state coffers, had been temporarily blocked since October last year by order of an appeals court.
“We are talking about a subsidy of 400,000 million dollars that contravenes the appropriations authority of Congress,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said in February in an opinion on the matter for the court’s conservative majority.
In the minority opinion, Judge Elena Kagan recalls that Congress granted the Department of Education broad powers to act in an emergency — how the White House understands the student debt crisis — and ensures that the Supreme Court has made an “unnatural” interpretation of reality.
All of this, Kagan added, with the aim of “impersonating Congress and the Executive to dictate a national policy with an opinion based on their own policies and preferences”.
Likewise, Kagan also calls into question the invocation made by the conservative majority of the Supreme of the so-called “doctrine on major issues”; a “fabric” that conservative justices are resorting to to oppose any initiative that the US Congress has not explicitly supported.
“They are asking Congress,” Kagan has argued in this regard, “not only to act clearly, but to act micro-specifically.”
