The Supreme Court has rejected an emergency lawsuit to block the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected an emergency appeal from the Brown County, Wisconsin, Taxpayers Association, which sued to stop the plan from being enacted, arguing that the administration overstepped its authority in enacting the plan. Barrett, who oversees emergency appeals from Wisconsin, dismissed the appeal without comment, which is the standard procedure for emergency appeals.
While Barrett did not issue a statement, The New York Times reported that “Justice Barrett most likely rejected the application because the plaintiff, the Brown County Taxpayers Association, did not appear to have shown that it had suffered a direct injury that gave it standing to sue.” The fact that Barrett acted on her own, without referring the case to the full court or asking the administration to respond to the petition, indicated that it was not on solid ground legally, the NYT reported.
The BCTA argued in its filing that Biden overstepped his authority under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (‘HEROES’) Act of 2003, which allows the Secretary of Education to modify federal aid programs for students during a war or a period of national emergency. The association also claimed that the sheer amount of money being handed out warranted an injunction. “We are witnessing a gargantuan increase in the national debt accomplished by a complete disregard for limitations on the constitutional spending authority,” they wrote.
The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge earlier this month. Judge William C. Griesbach of the Eastern District of Wisconsin ruled that the BCTA lacked standing to sue. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, however, that the payment of taxes is generally not enough to establish standing to challenge an action taken by the Federal Government,” Griesbach wrote in his opinion, via the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. He wrote further that an injunction against the plan may not even be necessary. “A future administration may not be bound” by the plan, he wrote via NYT, “and may seek to collect the purportedly forgiven debts.”
Before the group appealed to SCOTUS, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear an appeal in an unsigned order with no opinion, the NYT reported.
The Wisconsin lawsuit failed, but it is far from the only suit that was filed to stop the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan. The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit against the plan on September 27; then on September 29, six state attorneys general filed a complaint. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed his own lawsuit the same day. Then on October 10, the Job Creators Network Foundation’s Legal Action Fund filed another lawsuit seeking to stop the plan.
In the meantime, student loan borrowers are already rushing to take advantage of the debt forgiveness plan, which forgives up to $10,000 for borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year, and up to $20,000 for students who applied for Pell grants. A beta site for the application launched last week, and more than eight million borrowers successfully applied to have their loans forgiven between Friday and Monday.