The Supreme Court agreed to hear a second legal objection by the Biden administration to lower courts’ blocking President Joe Biden’s Student Debt Relief Program.
The two cases are at the center of an effort by the Biden administration to reinstate the ambitious student loan forgiveness program.
The loan forgiveness would provide borrowers making less than $125,000 yearly $10,000 in student debt relief.
February is the soonest arguments in the case — which may be consolidated with an earlier dispute — would be heard.
The case the SCOTUS agreed to hear on Monday stems from a legal challenge to the debt relief program brought by individual borrowers in Texas. The individual borrowers argued that how Biden enacted the program was procedurally improper.
Last month, a federal judge in Texas invalidated the student debt relief program, a ruling that a New Orleans-based Federal Appeals court upheld.
When SCOTUS agreed to hear the Biden administration’s arguments to this case, it had already decided to hear arguments in a separate case based on a St. Louis-based appeals court.
The St. Louis appeals court halted the student loan forgiveness program in response to a challenge brought by six conservative states: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
In the St. Louis ruling, a three-judge panel determined Biden’s passage of the student loan forgiveness progress usurped Congress’s authority. But the White House argues this isn’t the case, claiming Biden was well within his authority to authorize the debt relief program, pointing to provisions within the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act.
