Biden encounters new political risks due to recent student loans lawsuit

A fresh lawsuit revives an old challenge for President Joe Biden — delivering on his 2020 campaign pledge to forgive student loans.

Biden announced in 2022 that he’d “cancel” $10,000 of federal student debt per borrower, only to see his plan ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. He has since announced another $144 billion in student debt writeoffs and created a program to lower future payments, but he was slapped with a new lawsuit by a coalition of Republican-led states on Thursday.

“Last time defendants tried this the Supreme Court said that this action was illegal,” reads a portion of the suit from Kansas and 10 other states. “Nothing since then has changed, other than introducing more legal errors into this rule’s underlying analysis.”

Missouri has promised to deliver a second suit making similar arguments next week, creating the possibility that Biden will once again face a political setback on student loans that could dampen enthusiasm for his reelection campaign in 2024, particularly among younger voters.

Biden has aggressively pursued student debt transfers even without congressional support. His original plan would have written off at least $400 billion of debt, and since it was struck down, he has announced new rounds of cancellation using a different legal justification, plus the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan, to lower loan payments drastically.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated that SAVE could add $475 billion to the national debt over 10 years.

Those moves have outraged Republicans who say Biden is breaking the law for what is effectively a net wealth transfer from people who did not go to college to people who did.

“The vast majority of Americans recognize that it’s unfair to do that,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who led the lawsuit, told the Washington Examiner. “It is effectively a gift, a grant, from the federal government. Well, who pays that? It doesn’t come out of thin air, it comes from the rest of us taxpayers.”

But advocates say removing the burden of student debt will allow younger people to focus on bigger goals, such as buying houses or starting families. More importantly from a political perspective, they say it’s popular.

“It’s politically valuable for right-wing politicians to try and twist the knife on a president that they perceive as being vulnerable on this issue,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “But the polling shows that this is a winning hand for Biden.”

Pierce’s group released a poll that found roughly 75% of voters support government action to address student loan debt, with 50% of registered voters supporting government action to cancel the debt. About 44 million people in the United States have federal student loans.

The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but the president certainly appears to believe that student loans are a winning topic, pushing it repeatedly and openly bragging that the Supreme Court “didn’t stop me.”

The White House hosted a “Day of Action” last week to promote its student loans programs, featuring Vice President Kamala Harris, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, and more than 40 organizations ranging from labor unions to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But the strategy could prove risky, especially if the courts side with Kansas and Missouri. Biden faced a lot of harsh scrutiny after his original plan was blocked just two days after the midterm elections.

“They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out — knowing it wasn’t going anywhere [because] they relied on faulty legal authority,” former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray wrote in a post on X. “Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn’t do this intentionally.”

This time around, the lawsuits are coming seven months before Election Day, meaning they could block Biden’s plans with enough time to leave a lot of voters disappointed and angry. That scenario might leave Biden with a backup strategy of blaming Republicans, something he is already pursuing when it comes to the southern border crisis.

But Democratic strategist Michael Stratton predicted that the president will come out ahead either way.

“The president should stick to his guns and continue to pursue the effort in the face of these lawsuits,” Stratton said.

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He said the Republican element will be obvious from the lawsuits and that Biden should focus on his own efforts instead rather than decrying the GOP.

“‘I made a commitment and I’m standing by it,’” Stratton said, paraphrasing what he thinks Biden’s message should be. “‘I’m having difficulties with the Republicans, but I’m as good as my word and I’m working on it.’ In my mind, there’s no downside.”