New Report on State State Standing in Student Loan Case Comes Up A Few Dollars Short
Biden v. Nebraska, the legal challenge to the Biden Administration’s student loan forgiveness program is likely to be decided on standing. If the justices reach the merits, there is little question they will conclude that Congress did not authorize this sort of wholesale loan forgiveness by executive branch decree. But it is not clear that the justices will reach the merits, as it is not clear the plaintiffs have standing.
This week, the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective issued a new report purporting to challenge the factual basis for state standing in Nebraska v. Biden. Specifically, the report purported to show that Missouri’s argument that it has standing because student loan forgiveness will cause MOHELA—a student loan servicer created by Missouri—”to lose financial revenue, thereby harming the state” is “fundamentally false.”
Progressive commentators rushed to proclaim that the report blew a hole in the arguments for state standing to challenge student loan forgiveness. Tori Otten of The New Republic proclaimed that the report shows “the main argument at the heart of the lawsuit is utterly false.” University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck tweeted that the study revealed “MOHELA won’t be injured by the program at all” (emphasis in original).
The entire (untested) theory of standing in the red state challenge to President Biden’s student loan debt relief program is based on a claimed injury to MOHELA. Even if that would be enough (and it shouldn’t be), it turns out that MOHELA won’t be injured by the program *at all.* https://t.co/ZNmTV1jBex
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) May 2, 2023
Yet if one reads the study, one sees that it shows no such thing. To the contrary, it demonstrates quite conclusively that the Biden Administration’s student loan forgiveness plan will result in MOHELA receiving millions of dollars less in revenue than it would have otherwise. Whether or not harms to MOHELA should be considered harms to Missouri, there is no way to read the report as showing that MOHELA “won’t be injured at a
Article from Reason.com
