Biden's Plan B for Student Debt
Since the Supreme Court struck down his forgiveness plan, the president has been moving fast, but little about this process will be quick. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Supreme Courts debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Bidenand to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic : Bidens Plan B The way President Biden talked about debt relief was vivid, almost epic: When he announced his sweeping student-loan debt-relief plan last August, he said in the West Wing, People can start to finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt. Almost a year later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 63 decision that his plan could not move forward. This ruling is a blow to Bidenand to the millions of people who were reshaping their lives and their spending habits around the expectation that their loans would be forgiven. I dont think that people are properly understanding how difficult this payment restart is going to be from a logistical standpoint for borrowers, my colleague Adam Harris, who covers higher education for The Atlantic , told me. Bidens initial debt-relief plan relied on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, or the HEROES Act . That law gives the secretary of education the power to waive or modify federal-student-loan provisions after national emergencies (President Donald Trump previously used it to pause loan repayment at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic). But last week, the Court determined that the 2003 law did not give Biden the authority to cancel debt. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the major-questions doctrine, which dictates that Congress must clearly authorize action on issues of major economic and political significance. (In a striking dissent, Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the decision was constitutional. At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent, she wrote . In exercising authority it does not have, she concluded, the Court violates the Constitution.) Bidens administration moved quickly to Plan B (and beyond). The Department of Education released a statement on Friday saying that it had already initiated a new rule-making process to open up different paths to push through debt relief, including using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which contains a provision giving the secretary of education the authority to compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand. It also announced other changes that would cut borrowers some slack, including a more affordable repayment plan and a year-long on-ramp to repayment. Many advocates wanted Biden to use the Higher Education Act as the basis for debt relief in the first place. Braxton Brewington, the press secretary of the activist group Debt Collective, told me that his group has been pushing for Biden to use the HEA. What we would love to say more than anything is that the Biden administration did everything they could, he added. One challenge that comes with pivoting to the HEA is that it needs to go through the negotiated rule-making process, which is likely to be long and drawn-outWere talking several months at minimum, Adam told me, and maybe up to 18 months. The desire for a quicker process may be one reason the Biden administration turned to the HEROES Act first, he said, though the main reason the Biden administration did things this way is that it thought it had broad authority under HEROES to provide debt relief. (Some Supreme Court justices agreed, Adam noted.) Asked for comment, the Department of Education sent a link to a press conference where Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona echoed that point, saying, We believe that the HEROES Act pathway was quicker and we had the authority to do that. And a new debt-relief plan that uses the HEA instead of HEROES may face similar legal challenges. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor who has written for The Atlantic , told me that, in his view, such a plan would be dead on arrival at the Supreme Court. He said that the Court had made this clear both in commentary surrounding the case and in the legal rule that it applied in Nebraska v. Biden . The rule puts such a thumb on the scale against executive action that it precludes the Higher Education Act from being the basis, he told me. (At the press conference last week, Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, said , We think that the pathway that were choosing here, the Higher Education Act, is available even with [the major questions] doctrine in place.) Shugerman added, however, that its perfectly appropriate for the Biden administration to challenge the Courts ruling while also pursuing other avenues to push through debt relief. He suggested that the Biden administration could simultaneously invite individual debtors facing hardship to apply for relief through a settlement process. That would take time, he said, and the plan may still face court challengesbut at least it would not be simply raising similar problems that the Roberts Court identified. Shugerman had long been skeptical that using the HEROES Act to pass student-loan relief would make it past the Court. In The Atlantic last year, he argued that the Biden administrations framing of debt relief as a COVID-era emergency measure, when in reality it was a much broader initiative, made it likely to fail. That COVID is not the real reason for such a sweeping program is a serious legal problem, he wrote . Taking a bold stance on student debt could be politically useful for Biden and Democrats in the lead-up to 2024. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me, If President Biden cares about motivating young people, motivating communities of color, and motivating working people in general who are saddled with student debt, this is a really smart issue to keep leaning into and increase the volume on. All of this work may take time, potentially even bleeding into the next presidential race and administration. And broader issues in higher education persist: Supporting students on the front end going to college and helping them get through would be preferable to having them accrue this large amount of debt in the first place, Adam Harris told me. Taken together, he said, the debt-relief ruling and the Courts ruling on race-conscious college admissions last week tell us that the Court does not adequately account for the broader history of higher education in these decisions. He added that it simply does not think about the weight that history has and continues to play. Related: Todays News Evening Read In France, Nihilistic Protest Is Becoming the Norm By Thomas Chatterton Williams Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena , about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched. To log on to social media or turn on the TV in France over the past week was to have been transported into Athena s world. Late last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was driving illegally, after he accelerated out of a traffic stop. His death has triggered days of violence that have convulsed the country and at times verged on open revolt. Groups of disaffected youth have incinerated cars, buses, trams, and even public libraries and schools. Roving mobs have clashed with armored police; giddy teens have ransacked sneaker and grocery stores ; frenzied young men have filmed one another blasting what look to be Kalashnikovs into the sky. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Read. No Longer Human , by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, is a cult classic that captures the stress of social alienation. Listen. Sorry, honey, its too hot for camp. On the newest episode of Radio Atlantic , host Hanna Rosin discusses how climate change is killing the childhood of our imaginations. Play our daily crossword. P.S. Yesterday evening, I read a lovely appreciation of Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who died last month at the age of 92, in The New York Review of Books . The essay, written by Daniel Mendelsohn, recalled some delightful stories of years of friendship. But what I found especially moving was the way he highlighted Gottliebs roving curiosity. Although Bob had a first-class formal education, Mendelsohn writes, he was ultimately self-taught in the way that many people who are voracious and indiscriminate readers in their formative years are self-taught: because he sampled everything for himself firsthand, his relationship to books and, later, to all culture was wholly unfiltered by received opinion or theory or schools of thought. As a result, he was utterly without intellectual or cultural prejudicenot at all a bad model for an aspiring critic. Lora Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.