Supreme Court rejects lawsuit to stop Biden's $10,000 student loan forgiveness plan

Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday denied an emergency request by a Wisconsin county taxpayers group to halt the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program, pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Barrett issued the denial without comment one day after the emergency application was filed. The justice manages emergency matters from the Seventh Circuit and had the option to handle the emergency application herself or to refer it to the full court. Barrett acted without calling for a response from the U.S. Department of Justice.

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The emergency application for an injunction in Brown County Taxpayers Association v. Biden was the first challenge to the loan program to reach the high court. Lawsuits challenging the program have been filed in a number of jurisdictions recently, including by the libertarian Cato Institute. Cato, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, sued the administration on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.

In the Wisconsin application, the association’s counsel, Richard Esenberg of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, had argued, “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, or the right to sue. Standing has been the major obstacle to taxpayer suits challenging federal spending programs.