Chuck Schumer urges Biden to go as big as possible on student-loan forgiveness in an 11th-hour plea

• Chuck Schumer urged Biden to go as big as possible on student-debt relief.
• Biden is expected to announce broad loan forgiveness and a payment-pause extension on Wednesday.

After over two years, broad student-loan forgiveness could finally be here. And a leading Democrat wants to ensure President Joe Biden doesn't miss the opportunity to go big.

On Tuesday night, according to a Democrat familiar with the discussion, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called Biden to make a final push for the president to cancel as much student debt as possible. Biden is expected to make a final decision on Wednesday — he's said to be considering $10,000 in debt cancellation for borrowers making under $125,000 a year — and many Democrats, Schumer included, have argued that $10,000 is not enough.

Schumer and some of his Democratic colleagues have pushed for $50,000 in student-loan forgiveness, even after Biden rejected that amount of relief in April. During an AFL-CIO roundtable in June, Schumer vowed to continue fighting until $50,000 in relief is achieved.

"We need the working people of America, we need this powerful, progressive, thoughtful, and caring labor movement to make this issue the kind of issue that resonates from one end of America to the other," Schumer said, adding that borrowers "can't do all the things people look forward to because every month that damn payment is on their backs."

"Let's fight and persist until we succeed in canceling $50,000 in student debt," Schumer said.

Still, it's looking as if Biden will stick with $10,000, an amount he'd pledged during his campaign to approve. Along with an announcement on broad relief, millions of federal borrowers are awaiting news of a further extension of the student-loan payment pause, set to expire in a week, on August 31.

In anticipation of further relief, many Republican lawmakers have been on the offensive. In a blog post on Tuesday, the GOP's House Committee on Education and Labor described further extending relief as "unsustainable" and said the Biden administration's "plan to kick the can further down the road is causing significant problems for student borrowers and loan servicers."

But some advocates have said they're disappointed to hear what the president is considering. "If the rumors are true, we've got a problem," Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, wrote in a statement on Tuesday. "And tragically, we've experienced this so many times before.

"The interstate highway system devastated Black communities. Welfare reform tossed poor people of color by the wayside. The senate's failure to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act failed to save Black lives," Johnson said. "President Biden's decision on student debt cannot become the latest example of a policy that has left Black people — especially Black women — behind. This is not how you treat Black voters who turned out in record numbers and provided 90% of their vote to once again save democracy in 2020."