- In March, Republican lawmakers introduced a resolution to overturn Biden's student-debt relief.
- The House education committee is planning to vote on the bill next week, a spokesperson confirmed to Insider.
House Republicans are taking the next step to overturn President Joe Biden's student-loan forgiveness in Congress next week.
In March, GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Joni Ernst introduced a resolution to overturn Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which is an oversight tool Congress can use to overturn final rules put in place by government agencies.
GOP Rep. Bob Good introduced a companion version of that resolution in the House, and it looks like the lower chamber is planning to move forward with the bill. Politico first reported that the House education committee, led by Rep. Virginia Foxx, is planning to mark up the resolution on Wednesday ahead of a committee vote — and given the Republican majority in the House, the resolution will likely move forward. Currently, 48 GOP Senators and 88 House Republicans have signed onto the resolution.
"Where is the relief for the man who skipped college but is paying off his work truck, or the woman who paid off her loans and is now struggling to afford her mortgage?" Cassidy previously said in a statement. "This resolution prevents these Americans, whose debts look different from the favored group the Biden administration has selected, from picking up the bill for this irresponsible and unfair policy."
A Foxx spokesperson confirmed the plans to mark up the legislation to Insider.
To be sure, passage through the House is probably as far as this resolution will go. Although some Democratic senators, like Sens. Joe Manchin and Catherine Cortez Masto, have expressed some concerns with Biden's broad debt relief plan, it's highly likely that Biden will veto a resolution that would overturn relief he proposed. Additionally, while a CRA has a fast track capability, in that it allows a resolution introduced in the Senate to avoid filibuster and new amendments, it's only been successfully used to overturn a rule about 20 times since 1996.
"The stars have to align for the Congressional Review Act to be useful," Bridget Dooling, research professor at the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University and lecturer at George Washington Law School, previously told Insider.
"The Congressional Review Act is particularly potent as a tool in periods of transition from one party to another in the White House because that's a window when the sitting president might be more likely to sign a resolution that would disapprove a rule from the prior president from a different party," Dooling said.
Currently, Biden's broad debt relief is paused due to two conservative-backed lawsuits that blocked the implementation of the relief in November, and borrowers are awaiting a Supreme Court decision on the legality of the relief, expected by the end of June.
That hasn't stopped Republicans from coming up with their own plans to block debt relief from happening. Along with the CRA, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy's bill to raise the debt ceiling — which passed the House last week — including banning Biden's student-loan forgiveness and blocking any future relief. That bill is also highly unlikely to pass through the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House.