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One thing that confuses me as a non American is the details of how Biden ignored the Supreme Court here... did he find a loophole, or did just a drive a bus through the ruling and dared them to do something?
Surely it must be the first and its loopholery, but I'm not entirely sure how the rules work in these cases. For example it certainly seems like the court gets de facto ignored with New York gun laws, with high degrees of non cooperation from lower courts and law enforcement. To what degree can people just ignore the court and get away with it? That seems... odd.
When you own Harvard Law, everything you do is legal. The DNC owns Harvard Law.
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The loan forgiveness discussed in the press release are based on different programs than the loan forgiveness struck down by the supremes.
For example, the press release is announcing $7.7 billion more in loan forgiveness. $5.2 billion of that are based on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (basically requires making payments for 10 years while working a government job, with the balance forgiven at the end of the 10 years), a program expressly authorized by statute with some administrative adjustments implemented by the Biden administration.
That is in contrast to the program the supremes struck down(basically a flat $10-20 thousand in forgiveness if your income is below some threshold).
It should not be surprising that striking down the latter does not effect the former.
That does sound more reasonable, is there precedent that the president does have the power to make this forgiveness without involving congress?
It seems risky if this becomes the norm from an outside view, and could well lead to tit for tat... is it just because they're technically loans (you owe the federal government) rather than a literal targeted payment from the federal government to a group chosen by the president? In economic terms they're kind of fungible, but I assume there's fewer special interest groups to neatly forgive so it constrains the president at least a bit...
Of the $7.7 billion in recent forgiveness announced in OP's press release, $5.2 billion is based on a law passed during GWB's administration, and the first grants of forgiveness would have gone out during Trump's administration. So sure, precedent, but also statutory grounding.
If this surprises you, perhaps you should consider whether OP's post faithfully characterized the situation.
I have to admit my belief in this being "bullshit porkbarrel politics" has dropped from a 80 to 20 on an indexed basis, based on your comments.
I do think that if Trump tried anything like this, especially following on from a similar policy being slapped down by the supreme court, there would be far more protests. However, that's kind of hard to prove.
Plus, loan forgiveness still seems a fairly bad idea, independant from if it's legal...
For what it's worth, I don't wish to convince anyone this isn't porkbarrel politics. I think it is.
I simply take issue with the framing here that the Biden administration is ignoring and overriding the supreme court with this recent loan forgiveness.
Plenty of bad executive actions are perfectly legal.
And sometimes a first attempt at a goal is struck down, and a later, different attempt at the same goal is not. Trump's early travel restrictions in particular come to mind.
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"Based on" in the sense that a certain genre of Hollywood drama is "based on a true story".
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Most of the forgiveness is coming from a change in how the rules around repayment. The biggest shift is the terms of repayment - both parties when they've been in power have introduced various forms of repayment plans based on income, ability to pay, whatever, the normal administrative stuff.
The shift Biden's done is the newest plan drops the term to when previously, under certain plans, if you paid for 20 years, even if you didn't pay it off, the loan was forgiven (this was true under prior admins as well), they changed the terms to 10 years, and then, basically, anybody who has paid for 10 or more years now is getting their loan forgiven.
My understanding was that it is only up to a certain amount like 10 or 20k on the new 10 year plan, so not anyone for any amount. PSLF already was ten year, it was just a cluster till this admin fixed it.
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it is much more restricted:
just one out of 10. Originally Biden tried to invoke the 2003 HEROES act to cancel debt, which was much more comprehensive and entailed an near-unconditional $10-20k of loan forgiveness. This was an egregious arm-twisting of the original legislation so it didn't have much footing. The new proposal is more restricted, requiring 10 years of repayment to qualify, and falls under the PSLF Program, which was established under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007. The first one was much more like a handout compared to the second.
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The supreme court can't send people to enforce the law. It has no enforcement arm of its own. If the agencies that control all the people with guns choose to ignore them, there isn't really any recourse.
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