Marco Rubio slams the White House's 'lame attempts' to bash GOP lawmakers who got their PPP loans forgiven but are calling Biden's student-debt cancellation 'unfair'

• The White House called out GOP lawmakers who criticized student-loan relief, but got PPP loans forgiven.
• GOP Sen. Marco Rubio called it a "lame" argument, and said the two policies shouldn't be equated.

President Joe Biden's White House has not held back on Republican lawmakers who have criticized student-loan forgiveness.

After Biden announced up to $20,000 in student-debt cancellation for federal borrowers on Wednesday, many GOP lawmakers were quick to slam the action, calling it costly and unfair to taxpayers and those who have already paid off their debt.

The White House was quick to respond. In a Twitter thread on Thursday, it listed all of the Republicans who have been unhappy with student-loan forgiveness, alongside the amount of loans that previously had forgiven through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was pandemic aid created in 2020 to help businesses.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio doesn't see any validity in that comparison. In a Fox News op-ed on Friday morning, Rubio — who helped create PPP — wrote that "Biden's student debt forgiveness plan could not be more different, despite his lame attempts to draw similarities between the two."

"Let's start with the obvious: federal student loans were just that, loans. The whole idea was that students would take the loans to pay for an education that would lead to a job that repays them (along with the massive interest accumulated)," Rubio wrote.

"There are other practical differences as well," he added. "The president is now asking those same small business owners and employees, most of whom never went to college, to shoulder the burden of college debt for others."

Rubio's Chief of Staff Michael Needham also took on the issue on Twitter, saying that PPP was "conceived as 'forgivable' from Day 1 conditioned on keeping workers on payroll, to meet a particular set of circumstances our nation faced in a moment of crisis. That is in no way comparable to what the Biden folks are doing on student loans."

Some Republican lawmakers the White House singled out for having their PPP loans forgiven responded, as well. GOP Rep. Markwayne Mullin called it an "ignorant attack from a career politician who has never created a single job. 74 days before midterms, Joe Biden is targeting business owners for protecting their employees from government lockdowns. President Trump always supported American workers and job creators."

Still, Democratic lawmakers have continued to push back on conservative critiques of Biden's student-loan forgiveness. For example, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement condemning Biden's actions, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that "McConnell graduated from a school that cost $330 a year. Today it costs over $12,000. McConnell has done nothing to fix it — and is irate that the President is stepping up to help millions of working Americans drowning in debt. He can spare us the lectures on fairness."