Republicans Vote to Overturn Biden Plan

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House Republicans passed legislation Wednesday to invalidate President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness effort in an endeavor that is already expected to be doomed prior to reaching the Senate floor.

The bill, House Joint Resolution 45, proposes to nullify a rule issued by the Department of Education last October suspending federal student loan payments and discharging those debts.

The 217-204 party line vote now puts the legislation into the hands of a slim Democratic majority United States Senate, where independent-minded legislators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who could potentially join with Republicans to send the bill to the president’s desk.

That is, if the bill even comes up for a vote. Biden, who made student loan forgiveness a hallmark of his 2020 campaign and has viciously defended its legality in the courts, has already committed to vetoing that legislation, with the Senate likely lacking the votes it needs to override that veto.

Student loan borrowers stage a Sit-In on Capitol Hill at the office of U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to urge him to stop trying to block student debt cancellation on May 09, 2023, in Washington, D.C. House Republicans passed legislation Wednesday to invalidate President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness effort in an endeavor that is already expected to be doomed prior to reaching the Senate floor.
Jemal Countess/Getty Images

According to a recent report by the American Federation of Teachers, the GOP effort would likely have a detrimental impact on an estimated 268,000 borrowers, who would suddenly find themselves with thousands of dollars in back charges from their suspended loans without a commensurate change in income to pay them off.

The Biden White House, meanwhile, has maintained the student loan forgiveness program was an essential economic recovery tool following the COVID-19 pandemic and, while there would be hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues lost over the next several decades, it would represent only a marginal share of the overall U.S. economy each year while helping lower-income Americans succeed.

“This resolution is an unprecedented attempt to undercut our historic economic recovery and would deprive more than 40 million hard-working Americans of much-needed student debt relief,” the Office of Management and Budget told Politico in a statement earlier this week. “If Congress were to pass H.J. Res. 45, the President would veto it.”

Newsweek has reached out to the White House Press Office via email for comment.

Wednesday’s vote was not the first GOP-led effort to invalidate Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

While polling conducted for Newsweek earlier this week shows broad public support for the plan, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is set to weigh in on the validity of the initiative later this month in a case evaluating whether the White House has the constitutional authority to override Congress to forgive federal student loan debts.

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