- Republicans claimed Biden's student-debt relief should be blocked because it was a political move.
- In a legal filing, Biden said that argument is "unsurprising and legally insignificant."
If President Joe Biden is worried about Republican attempts to block his student-loan forgiveness, he's not showing it.
On Wednesday, a federal judge is expected to hear oral arguments from six Republican-led states who filed a lawsuit seeking to halt debt cancellation because the policy would hurt their states' tax revenues, among other things. It's one of at least five major lawsuits that have been filed so far with the same goal, and while a judge has struck down two of them because the plaintiffs did not have standing, Republicans are continuing to pursue every route they can think of to stop the debt relief.
In anticipation of the Wednesday hearing, Biden's administration filed its first legal defense of its $20,000 student-loan forgiveness plan and pushed back on every claim Republicans have made so far, including that canceling student debt is a political tool to advance Biden's agenda.
"That the policy is consistent with one of 'the President's policy goals,' is both unsurprising and legally insignificant," the defense stated.
It went on to cite a brief from the Department of Commerce that noted that policymaking is not "'unaffected by political considerations or the presence of Presidential power,' and there would be nothing problematic even if an agency action were 'informed by unstated considerations' of, among other things, 'politics, the legislative process, public relations, [and] interest group relations.'"
As the filing noted, canceling student debt has been one of Biden's goals even before he took office. On the campaign trail, he pledged to approve $10,000 in student-loan forgiveness for federal borrowers, and before that policy was enacted, he implemented targeted debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools and borrowers with disabilities.
But given the timing of his announcement of broad debt cancellation at the end of August — just months before the midterm elections — Republicans have been criticizing it as a potential political motive. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, for example, called it a "bribe" to voters leading up to the announcement, and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said that "Biden wants to raid the treasury to bribe his progressive base to turn out for the midterms."
The most recent lawsuit against debt relief filed by the Job Creators Network on Monday said that the relief was announced with the goal of implementing the policy before the November midterms to help Democrats win votes.
But some Democratic lawmakers have acknowledged the political benefits to the relief — and they said it's a good thing. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren told The Atlantic at the beginning of the year that implementing loan forgiveness will show a lot of people that Biden is on their side.
"Canceling student-loan debt for more than 40 million Americans would persuade a lot of young people that this president is in the fight for them," she said.