Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday rejected an emergency request by a group of Wisconsin taxpayers to block the enforcement of President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan.
Barrett, who typically fields emergency bids from Wisconsin, acted alone without referring the case to the rest of the Supreme Court bench or seeking a response from the government.
On Wednesday, the plaintiffs challenging Biden’s student-debt wipeout, which would effectively erase up to $10,000 in loans for graduates who earn less than $125,000 a year, filed an emergency petition to stop the government from implementing the plan pending litigation in the lower courts. Pell Grant recipients, under Biden’s order, would be eligible to receive $20,000.
The applicants argued that Biden’s edict would be a gross abuse of the executive’s spending power and saddle Americans, including those who didn’t go to college, with future new tax liabilities. Through the program, Biden will unilaterally spend roughly 4 percent of the nation’s GDP, the plaintiffs noted.
“We are witnessing a gargantuan increase in the national debt accomplished by a complete disregard for limitations on the constitutional spending authority. Applicant and those similarly situated are being asked to assume perhaps over one trillion dollars in debt,” the filing read. “The issue is not simply that the government has acted unconstitutionally in a way that harms others but not the Applicant itself. To the contrary, because the unlawful step alleged here tramples the constitutional spending power, it harms Applicant’s members as taxpayers.”
Barrett’s one-line decision preserves a lower court’s judgment that the group lacked standing to sue.
The Biden administration claims its order is authorized by the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003. Republicans have slammed it as an unconstitutional program that chiefly benefits affluent borrowers at the expense of Americans who didn’t receive a degree. Some Democrats have criticized it too, namely Senator Joe Manchin, who last week said that the plan was “excessive.”
“I just respectfully disagree on that,” he told reporters. “I think there’s other ways. When people were calling me from back in West Virginia, I would give them all the options they had that would reduce their loan by going to work in the federal government.”