Although the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness program in late June, his administration has found ways to cancel more than $48 billion in debt since then.
The cancellations have come through existing federal student loan forgiveness programs, which are limited to specific categories of borrowers, such as public-sector workers, people defrauded by for-profit colleges, and borrowers who have paid for at least 20 years.
These programs are separate from the rejected forgiveness plan, which would have canceled about $430 billion of the $1.6 trillion of outstanding federal student loan debt all at one time.
The Biden administration has been granting student loan forgiveness through these existing programs on a rolling basis since coming into office and has discharged a total of $127 billion for nearly 3.6 million people to date.
Schumer is the senate majority leader, he is the person who can bring things to a vote in the Senate. AOC should have focused her lobbying on the chamber of Congress she is a member of to bring a vote on a bill. Or even draft a bill for committee. Not just exhort the president to a course of action that was unlikely to proceed. I’m sure they did it either because they knew they didn’t have the votes, or to protect Dems in vulnerable seats. Either way, they shouldn’t have pushed their portion of the governments responsibility to the executive.
And he knew that thanks to centrists, he didn’t have the votes.
Was it Pelosi or AOC who decided which bills come to the floor? I get that you want to blame AOC for centrists’ resounding success in blocking loan forgiveness, but it’s a stretch at best.
Biden is still trying and not giving up after the very first setback. It’s no wonder members of his own party are primarying him from his right.