As a candidate in 2020, President Joe Biden promised to prioritize student loan debt relief, and whether one agrees with the goal or not, it’s clear that the Democrat’s pledges weren’t just hollow campaign rhetoric.
The trouble, of course, is that the GOP keeps pushing back in the opposite direction.
Last year, for example, Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices, responding to a Republican-backed lawsuit, effectively killed Biden’s $400 billion plan to cancel or reduce federal student loan debts for millions of Americans.
In the months that followed, the Democratic White House continued to take additional and incremental steps to assist those with crushing student loan debts, including launching the SAVE Repayment Plan in January.
Republicans want to kill it, too. My MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained over the weekend:
Several Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its plan to provide relief to millions of Americans burdened by student loan debt, accusing President Joe Biden of bypassing Congress and exceeding his authority. Filed by Kansas and 10 other states, the federal lawsuit claims that the administration’s income-driven SAVE Repayment Plan is similar to Biden’s previous student loan forgiveness plan in its government overreach, an argument that won at the Supreme Court last summer.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach — who was narrowly elected in 2022, despite his unfortunate background — is spearheading the effort, though GOP attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas and Utah have joined the effort. In the 2020 elections cycle, exit polling showed Biden defeating then-incumbent Donald Trump by a wide margin among voters under the age of 30. More recent polling has been all over the place, but the latest survey data nevertheless suggests the Democrat is struggling to duplicate his success among these younger voters in 2024. It’s against this backdrop that Kobach and his partisan cohorts are setting the stage for a legal fight that crystalizes an election-year dispute: Biden wants to offer student loan debt relief to millions of young Americans, and Republicans are fighting tooth and nail — again — to stop him. I’m not saying this will definitely pay political dividends for the incumbent president, but the lawsuit probably won’t help the GOP’s outreach efforts to 18- to 25-year-old voters.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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