Former President Donald Trump, who is currently the 2024 GOP frontrunner, has responded to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday determining that President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive tens of billions of dollars’ worth of student loans was unconstitutional.
Trump made his remarks during a speech at the Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors National Summit in Philadelphia before an enthusiastic crowd. He strongly criticized Biden’s proposal for student loan forgiveness, which aimed to forgive $10,000 for specific borrowers with federal student loans.
The plan would have canceled some debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 a year, Fox News reported, adding that Pell Grant recipients would have been given up to $20,000 in loan forgiveness.
“[It] would have been very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence,” Trump said during his speech. “Very unfair.”
“We have a corrupt president. Very corrupt,” the former president added. “But this was a way of trying to buy votes.”
In the Dept. of Education v. Brown, the Court ruled 9-0 that the plaintiffs did not have standing and tossed a lawsuit involving individual borrowers.
In Biden v. Nebraska, the justices ruled 6-3 that the loan forgiveness plan violated the Constitution.
On the merits of the plan, the Biden administration had relied on the HEROES Act, a post-9/11 law that allows the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs . . . as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” SCOTUS Blog reported
There are several legal instances involving the cancellation of student loans. In one instance, a class action complaint claimed that the Education Department had improperly delayed or denied hundreds of thousands of petitions for borrower defense to repayment. The settlement agreement would erase over 200,000 borrowers’ student loans worth $6 billion, rehabilitate their credit, and reimburse their payments.
The Supreme Court also heard oral arguments in the cases of Department of Education v. Brown and Biden v. Nebraska, both of which seek the court to invalidate the student loan debt reduction initiative that President Joe Biden launched in August. For individuals who did not get Pell Grants, the program would erase up to $10,000 in student loan debt; for those who did, it would forgive up to $20,000 in debt.
“More than three years after payments were paused and interest rates on the loans were reduced to 0% in March 2020 during the Trump administration and extended multiple times under Biden, student loan interest will begin accruing again on Sept. 1 and payments will be due in October. The Department of Education told FOX Business earlier this month it will notify the more than 40 million student loan borrowers ‘well before payments restart,’” Fox Business reported.