Stop! Supreme Court asked to halt Biden’s $10,000 student loan forgiveness program
In an emergency request, a group of Wisconsin taxpayers has filed a lawsuit challenging the plan days after the administration began accepting applications.
A Wisconsin county taxpayers association on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program, pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
The emergency application for an injunction in Brown County Taxpayers Association v. Biden is the first challenge to the loan program to reach the high court.
Plaintiffs have filed lawsuits challenging the program in a number of jurisdictions.
The application was directed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who handled emergency matters from the Seventh Circuit. She might rule on it herself or refer it to the full court.
In the application, Richard Esenberg of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argues, “There is no legal justification for this presidential usurpation of the constitutional spending power, which is reserved exclusively for Congress. This step, which is certainly a major question under cases such as West Virginia v. EPA, is predicated on a law passed under different circumstances to accomplish different purposes for different beneficiaries.”
A federal district court earlier this month dismissed the association’s lawsuit for lack of standing—the right to sue. Standing has been a major obstacle to taxpayer suits challenging federal spending programs.
“Applicant is aware that prudential notions of standing are an issue here,” Esenberg wrote. “Courts should not become a forum to do no more than refight legislative battles. But that is not what’s happening here. We are witnessing a gargantuan increase in the national debt accomplished by a complete disregard for limitations on the constitutional spending authority.”
The association asserts it has taxpayer standing under a little-used Supreme Court decision, Flast v. Cohen, which has applied in very narrow circumstances. Under Flast, ”the taxpayer must show that the challenged enactment exceeds specific constitutional limitations imposed upon the exercise of congressional taxing and spending power and not simply that the enactment is generally beyond the powers delegated to Congress” by the Constitution.
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Esenberg raises two questions for the justices in the application: Is there taxpayer standing here under Flast, ”or is the taxpayer-standing doctrine announced in Flast effectively a dead letter that ought to be overruled?” And, does the Major Questions Doctrine prevent the president from relying on the HEROES Act, an act designed to support the “men and women of the United States Military,” to create a massive federal program of loan forgiveness for tens of millions of Americans?
The administration’s “One-Time Student Debt Relief” plan is scheduled to begin canceling debt on Oct. 23. The plan will cancel up to $20,000 in federal loans to individuals with income below $125,000 or $250,000 for households.