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Justice Amy Coney Barrett denies emergency challenge to Biden’s student loan bailout

October 21, 2022 | | Print Article

Challenges to President Joe Biden’s plan to simply cancel billions of dollars in student debt are coming up empty after Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined without explanation to hear an emergency challenge from the Brown County Taxpayers Association and a federal judge in St. Louis threw out a challenge from six Republican-led states on a technicality.

With victories in both cases, the Biden administration is now free to move forward with its intention to cancel up to $10,000 in student loans and as much as $20,000 for those with Pell grants — a move that, as American Wire previously reported, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will increase the cost of student loans “by about an additional $400 billion in present value.”

Opposition to the program, aimed at winning votes for the Dems in the November midterm elections, argues that Biden’s plan is both unconstitutional and unfair to those who dutifully paid back their loans.

Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina banded together and challenged the President’s executive action, claiming the “unlawful” program would drain their states’ tax revenues and cause financial harm to state-established entities that service student loans, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In dismissing the case, St. Louis U.S. District Judge Henry E. Autrey claimed the GOP leaders who led the charge didn’t have standing because they failed to show Biden’s program had harmed them, calling the claim that tax revenue would be depleted “merely speculative.”

“While plaintiffs present important and significant challenges to the debt relief plan, the current plaintiffs are unable to proceed,” Autrey wrote.

The states plan to quickly appeal.

“While the court said that the states do not have standing to bring this lawsuit, the states continue to believe that they do in fact have standing to raise their important legal challenges,” said Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson.

The disappointing loss in St. Louis came just an hour after Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined without comment to hear the case brought by the Wisconsin taxpayers.

While Dems are cheering the move toward more massive spending, Republicans have repeatedly likened the plan to socialism.

Following Biden’s announcement of the plan in August, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it “a slap in the face” to struggling Americans who made good on their obligations.

“Democrats’ student loan socialism is a slap in the face to working Americans who sacrificed to pay their debt or made different career choices to avoid debt,” he tweeted at the time. “A wildly unfair redistribution of wealth toward higher-earning people.”

“The median American with student loans already has a significantly higher income than the median American overall,” he wrote in a statement. “Experts who studied similar past proposals found that the overwhelming benefit of student loan socialism flows to higher-earning Americans. Democrats specifically wrote this policy to make sure that people earning six figures would benefit.”

“President Biden’s inflation is crushing working families, and his answer is to give away even more government money to elites with higher salaries,” he continued. “Democrats are literally using working Americans’ money to try to buy themselves some enthusiasm from their political base.”

Melissa Fine
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