ACLJ Files Amicus Brief With Supreme Court Supporting Challenge to President Biden's Unconstitutional Taxpayer-Funded Student Loan Forgiveness Boondoggle

Recently, the ACLJ filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court of the United States in a major case challenging the Biden Administration’s new student loan forgiveness program. The program, which the Biden Department of Education created out of whole cloth, arbitrarily cancels $10,000 of student debt for anybody earning below $125,000 per year (or for married couples, $250,000). This taxpayer giveaway boondoggle is completely unsupported by federal law.

The program will cost taxpayers up to $400 billion and will effectively penalize the millions of Americans who faithfully paid off their federal student loans or chose vocational training or other career paths – sometimes at a significant personal sacrifice. The program is also grossly unfair to the millions of Americans who saved up to pay for college rather than take out student loans.

But as unfair as the student loan cancelation program is, its worst flaw is that it is another example of the Biden Administration issuing an administrative diktat when Congress does not do the President’s bidding. Never forget that Congress has the power of the purse, and only Congress has the authority to enact a nationwide loan forgiveness program of such enormous scope.

As we explained here, the Biden Administration claimed that Congress granted it this power in the HEROES Act. In actuality, Congress passed the HEROES Act in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and its purpose was to ensure that the “[h]undreds of thousands of Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard reservists and members of the National Guard [who] ha[d] been called to active duty or active service” would not be “placed in a worse position financially” in relation to their student loans because of their military service.

In addition to ignoring the HEROES Act’s clear limited purpose to benefit members of the military serving in the war on terror, the Biden Administration has now perverted this legislation by attempting to shoehorn COVID-19 into the HEROES Act’s use of the term “national emergency.” Remember, the Biden Administration was quick to discard COVID-19 as a national emergency when it wanted to allow illegal immigrants to flood our southern border. Political expediency should not determine when the President labels something a national emergency.

Numerous states and private plaintiffs challenged the program in federal court, and a federal district court held that the program was unconstitutional. The case is now before the Supreme Court of the United States. Oral argument will be held on February 28.

The ACLJ’s amicus brief argues that the best evidence that Congress retained the power to address student loan indebtedness and did not delegate its power to the Department of Education is Congress’ extensive legislative activity on the issue. During Biden’s presidency, Members of Congress introduced numerous bills addressing student loan indebtedness . . . but Congress never passed a single bill.

We pointed out in our brief: “It should be axiomatic that when Congress considers multiple bills addressing a major national policy, it is because Congress retained its power to do so, has not yet chosen to exercise that power, and did not somehow forget that it had delegated that power to the Executive Branch.”

The brief also argued that nothing in the HEROES Act supports the Secretary of Education’s claim that Congress delegated legislative power over an en masse student loan forgiveness program: “The Secretary’s broad reading of ‘national emergency’ . . . stuffs the proverbial elephant into the mousehole by detaching [the term] from the HEROES Act’s limited purpose.” As noted above, the original intent was to help service members serving in the war on terror, which the Secretary of Education completely ignored.

We conclude in our brief that the unconstitutional program threatens the separation of powers because a major national policy is being set by the politically unaccountable administrative state rather than by Congress, which answers to the people.

“Money is the instrument of policy and policy affects the lives of citizens. The individual loses liberty in a real sense if that instrument is not subject to traditional constitutional constraints.” Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 451 (1998) (Kennedy, J., concurring). Congressionally unauthorized administrative mandates with nationwide scope and multi-billion-dollar price tags rend the fabric of separation of powers and threaten the liberty of all citizens.

We must preserve the system of checks and balances that our Founding Fathers instituted. The President cannot unilaterally disperse money at will for political gain. The ACLJ will continue to fight to keep the checks and balances of our nation in place and hold those accountable who attempt to usurp too much authority.