A Republican senator accused President Joe Biden of “mortgaging our country’s financial health” by extending a pause in student loan payments while he pursues a plan to cancel some of the loan debt, though he acknowledged his measure to block the proposal does not have the votes.
(Bloomberg) — A Republican senator accused President Joe Biden of “mortgaging our country’s financial health” by extending a pause in student loan payments while he pursues a plan to cancel some of the loan debt, though he acknowledged his measure to block the proposal does not have the votes.
“I need people to understand he has contributed to the exhaustion, the acceleration of the exhaustion of our ability to borrow,” Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said in a round-table interview with Bloomberg reporters and editors in New York on Monday. “His policy would have done that and he’s actively pursuing those same policies now.”
He spoke a day before the president meets with congressional leaders to resolve a standoff over the nation’s debt limit before.
Cassidy, along with fellow Senate Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Joni Ernst of Iowa, introduced a resolution to overturn the president’s student loan forgiveness plan through a procedure that allows Congress to override federal regulations lawmakers disapprove of while avoiding a filibuster.
Biden’s program to forgive as much as $20,000 per borrower has faced multiple court challenges and is currently suspended pending a Supreme Court ruling. The program is limited to individuals who make less than $125,000 a year and $250,000 for households.
With the Democrats’ 51-49 Senate majority, Cassidy’s measure would require some Democratic support to pass.
He said there was no timeline for when it would come to the Senate floor and that he had not spoken with any Democrats about possibly supporting it.
He suggested Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who left the Democratic Party to become an independent, as one of the people he might approach.
Yet even if the resolution passed the Senate and the Republican-led House the action would likely be symbolic since a two-thirds majority in both chambers would be needed to overcome a certain Biden veto, which Cassidy acknowledged. But he still sees an opportunity to get a message out.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the student loan plan could cost the federal government $400 billion.
Proponents say the program would relieve the burden on many borrowers who must pay off loans long after they leave college, but critics say that would be unfair to those who had already paid off their loans or did not go to college.
Cassidy asserted that there were enough programs in place through which borrowers under a certain income threshold could seek forgiveness.
The House Education Committee will take the first step Wednesday on that chamber’s version of the resolution.
“Since his first day in office, President Biden has worked to circumvent the courts and congressional authority to provide backdoor free college through the student loan program. The president is leveraging the nation’s financial future with his radical agenda that, taken together, could end up costing taxpayers nearly $1 trillion,” Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, chair of the Education Committee, said in a statement.
This is not the only tactic Republican lawmakers are using in their attempts to kill off the student loan forgiveness program.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bill to cut spending and raise the debt ceiling, which passed the House, included language to block the forgiveness plan and end the pause on federal student loan payments, put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the student loan pause cost more than $5 billion a month.
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