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- GOP lawmakers reintroduced a bill to end the student-loan payment pause and block Biden's broad debt relief.
- They said it's unfair to those who already paid off their student loans.
- This comes just under two weeks before Biden's student-debt relief plan is headed to the Supreme Court.
Republican lawmakers are once again trying to put millions of student-loan borrowers back into repayment.
On Thursday, GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Thune reintroduced the Stop Reckless Student Loan Actions Act, which would end the ongoing student-loan payment pause and block President Joe Biden from canceling student debt broadly in connection with a national emergency.
This comes just under two weeks before Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt is headed to the Supreme Court. After announcing the relief at the end of August, two conservative-backed lawsuits blocked the implementation of the plan, and as a result, Biden extended the student-loan payment pause 60 days after June 30, or 60 days after the lawsuits are resolved, whichever happens first.
But Thune, Cassidy, and some of their Republican colleagues don't want to wait for the litigation to play out.
"President Biden is unfairly transferring the burden from those who willingly took on loans to those who did not," Cassidy said in a statement. "There is no support for the man who didn't go to college but is paying off a work truck or the woman who responsibly paid off her student loans but is struggling with her mortgage. This legislation stops Biden from sticking them with the bill for hundreds of billions of dollars."
Thune added in a statement that it's "incredibly unfair to those who never incurred student debt because they didn't attend college in the first place or because they either worked their way through school or their family pinched pennies and planned for higher education."
Still, it's unlikely legislation of this nature would succeed — even if it passes the House, the Democratic-controlled Senate would strike it down, and if it ended up getting to Biden's desk, he would veto it.
Republicans have also criticized the legal route Biden is choosing to enact this relief. He used the HEROES Act of 2003, which allows the Education Secretary to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency, like COVID-19. The lawsuits that blocked the relief, along with Republican lawmakers, said using that law is an overreach of Biden's authority and student-loan forgiveness should require Congressional approval, but Biden's administration has argued that using the HEROES Act is well within its authority to ensure borrowers are not left worse off from the economic impacts of the pandemic, which can be long lasting.
House Republicans also recently suggested ending the student-loan payment pause as a proposal it would support in potential budget cuts, and over half of House GOP lawmakers, and nearly all Senate GOP lawmakers, filed amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court opposing student-loan forgiveness.
Biden's administration has remained firm against the staunch opposition to its plan. The Justice Department's legal defense pushed back against the plaintiffs' standing to sue in both of the cases, and the White House wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that "26 million Americans across all 50 states applied or were automatically eligible for one-time student debt relief before the program was blocked."
"The only thing stopping millions of these borrowers from experiencing relief right now are lawsuits brought by opponents of our plan," it wrote.