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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Chris Stein in Washington

Student loan forgiveness: Biden hails plan for ‘generation saddled with unsustainable debt’ – as it happened

Jill Biden Joe Biden White House Donald Trump Texas FBI Karine JeanPierre Steven Portnoy Delaware NAACP

Closing summary

President Joe Biden announced his long-awaited plan to provide student loan relief, which he said would allow tens of millions of Americans to “finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt”. Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating after their candidate prevailed in a politically finicky House district’s special election last night, a sign that the party may be more popular than expected.

Here’s more about what happened today:

Opponents of Biden’s student debt plan have claimed it is unfair to Americans who already paid off their loans. The president was asked about this as he wrapped up his speech at the White House.

In his response, he draws a comparison to the business-friendly cuts that exist across America’s tax code:

As he spoke at the White House, Biden made special mention of how his plan would give racial minorities some relief from their heavy debt loads.

“About a third of the borrowers have debt but no degree, the worst of both worlds, debt and no degree. The burden is especially heavy on Black and Hispanic borrowers, who on average have less family wealth to pay for it… they don’t own their homes to borrow against to be able to pay for college. And the pandemic only made things worse,” Biden said.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) civil rights group has been vocal in encouraging Biden’s student debt relief efforts. NAACP president Derrick Johnson expressed some support for the White House plan, but added it didn’t go as far as the group hoped.

Biden has concluded his White House address on student loan relief, but as the president was heading out the door, a reporter asked whether he had any advance knowledge of the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

“I didn’t have any advance notice,” Biden answered. “None, zero, not one single bit.”

The White House has previously said the president was not told ahead of time of the FBI’s plans to search the south Florida property as part of its investigation into the former president’s alleged retention of government secrets.

Updated

Biden has compared his measure relieving some student debt to his administration’s efforts to revive the economy following the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our approach is why America’s economic recovery … was faster and stronger than any other advanced nation in the world. And now it’s time to address the burden of student debt the same way,” the president said. His administration’s goal is “to provide more breathing room for people so they have less burdened by student debt.”

Biden predicted his plan would provide relief to 43 million people, comprised of two groups: those who received a Pell Grant and will be eligible for $20,000 in relief, and those who received other federal student loans and will be eligible for $10,000 in relief. Both groups will need to make under $125,000 a year to qualify, or $250,000 for families. “All this means people can start finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt,” Biden said, predicting the relief would completely cancel the debts of 20 million people.

Among his measures, Biden extended the pause on student debt repayments to the end of the year, but has made clear he won’t do that again. “I’m extending to December 31, 2022. And it’s going to end at that time,” he said.

Updated

Declaring “education is a ticket to a better life”, Biden is outlining his plan to relieve student debt in a speech at the White House.

“Over time, that ticket has become too expensive for too many Americans. All this means is the entire an entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt,” Biden said, speaking alongside education secretary Miguel Cardona. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate you may not have access to middle-class life that the college degree was” meant to provide.

Updated

Joe Biden is over 15 minutes late to his planned speech on student loan relief, but the White House just released the below video, in which he explains the plan.

Perhaps this is what’s been keeping him:

President Joe Biden will soon make an address from the White House, where he’ll detail his plan to relieve student loan debt.

You can follow along at the live stream at the top of this page. For those just tuning in, here’s a link to the department of education page explaining how the program will work.

Earlier today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned the Texas court decision that blocked hospitals from being required to carry out emergency abortions.

“Today’s decision is a blow to Texans,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement. “Texas filed this suit to ensure that it can block medical providers from providing life-saving and health-preserving care. Because of this decision, women in Texas may now be denied this vital care – even for conditions like severe hemorrhaging or life-threatening hypertension. It’s wrong, it’s backwards, and women may die as a result. The fight is not over. The President will continue to push to require hospitals to provide life-saving and health-preserving reproductive care.”

Updated

The Biden administration’s attempt to preserve abortion access in states with governments hostile to the procedure faced a setback in Texas, as Edwin Rios reports:

A federal judge in Texas has blocked a Biden administration guidance that required hospitals to provide emergency abortions, even in states like Texas, which prohibits the practice following the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.

The legal effort by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a stalwart Republican, represents the latest attempt to stop the federal government from influencing the reproductive access landscape in the aftermath of the supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned longstanding constitutional protections on abortion.

Such preventions on abortion access could have devastating financial and health consequences on women, especially Black, Latino and Indigenous women who already disproportionately suffer from deaths during childbirth.

Updated

Here are a few more details about who the student loan relief plan will affect, from a briefing White House officials held with the press.

From CBS News:

And some of the mechanics of how it will work, from the New York Times:

Updated

Jill Biden is positive for Covid-19 again with rebound case

This just in: First lady Jill Biden has tested positive for Covid-19 again with a rebound case, announced the White House today.

The first lady had tested negative on Sunday and was with Biden at their beach house in Delaware.

Joe Biden will wear his mask for the next 10 days following Jill’s rebound case, reports Reuters.

Jill Biden is not experiencing any reemergence of symptoms, said the White House, and is currently following isolation procedures in Delaware.

“The First Lady has experienced no reemergence of symptoms, and will remain in Delaware where she has reinitiated isolation procedures,” her deputy communications director, Kelsey Donohue, said in a statement.

Previously, Joe Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on 31 July, testing positive again due to a rebound case.

Updated

Here’s more information on the impact of student debt on Black college students and how it reinforces the racial wealth gap from Andre M. Perry, Marshall Steinbaum, and Carl Romer of the Brookings Institute:

No matter what you want to do with your life, I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it,” President Barack Obama said in a 2009 national address to students. Such guidance is regularly told to Black people: The way to get out of poverty and achieve middle class status is to get a college degree.

But a college degree does not eliminate the income gaps between white and Black workers. Black students finance their education through debt, and thus college degrees actually further contribute to the fragility of the upwardly mobile Black middle class. And because education does not achieve income parity for Black workers, the disproportionate debt Black students are taking to finance their education is reinforcing the racial wealth gap.

Today, the average white family has roughly 10 times the amount of wealth as the average Black family, while white college graduates have over seven times more wealth than Black college graduates.

Read the full article here.

Experts and politicians are also emphasizing how student debt forgiveness is a racial equity issue considering the disproportionate impact that student debt has on racial minorities.

A majority of Black and Latinx students take out student loans to attend college.

On average, Black college graduates also owe tens of thousands of dollars more in debt than white college grads, a heightened financial burden.

From Princeton University professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr:

From Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal:

More reactions across both sides of the political aisle are coming in following Joe Biden’s announcement of his administration’s plan to alleviate student debt.

Washington senator Patty Murray called the the announcement “huge”, tweeting:

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who previously praised the plan, tweeted that the initiative is “a big deal”:

Meanwhile, very in line with Republican sentiment, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy shared his contempt for the measure, writing:

The specific measures will be further detailed during a later speech at 2:15 pm eastern time.

The day so far

President Joe Biden announced his long-awaited plan to relieve student debt, which he will detail in a White House address scheduled for 2:15 pm eastern time. Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating, after their candidate prevailed in a politically finicky house district’s special election last night in a sign that the party may be more popular than polls indicate.

Here’s more of what has happened so far today:

Calling it “student loan socialism”, the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell has blasted the Biden administration’s debt relief proposal.

Here’s an excerpt from his statement:

Washington Democrats have found yet another way to make inflation even worse, reward far-left activists, and achieve nothing for millions of working American families who can barely tread water.

President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt. This policy is astonishingly unfair.

The median American with student loans already has a significantly higher income than the median American overall. Experts who studied similar past proposals found that the overwhelming benefit of student loan socialism flows to higher-earning Americans. Democrats specifically wrote this policy to make sure that people earning six figures would benefit.

Biden’s allies are cheering his student debt relief announcement, with the Senate’s top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, a longtime advocate of the policy in the chamber, issuing a joint statement.

Here’s what the senators had to say:

“With the flick of a pen, President Biden has taken a giant step forward in addressing the student debt crisis by cancelling significant amounts of student debt for millions of borrowers. The positive impacts of this move will be felt by families across the country, particularly in minority communities, and is the single most effective action that the President can take on his own to help working families and the economy.

“This action, along with the pause on federal student loan payments, interest, and collections will improve borrowers’ economic security, allowing them to invest in their families, save for emergencies, and pay down other debt. In addition, we are pleased to see the President’s proposed work towards greatly simplifying and expanding access to student loan relief programs, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and look forward to additional improvements to other programs like Income Driven Repayment, which will also allow millions more student loan borrowers to better access existing programs to reduce their student loan debts.

“No president or Congress has done more to relieve the burden of student debt and help millions of Americans make ends meet. Make no mistake, the work - our work - will continue as we pursue every available path to address the student debt crisis, help close the racial wealth gap for borrowers, and keep our economy growing.”

For those curious about the finer points of the White House’s student debt relief plan, Joe Biden has just tweeted out a link to a website with further details:

Biden plans afternoon speech to detail student debt relief

The White House has just announced president Joe Biden will make a speech at 2.15pm eastern time to outline his student debt relief measures. He has also tweeted the basics of his proposal:

Updated

The GOP is teeing up their counter-attack to Biden’s impending announcement on student debt relief, decrying it as a “bribe” that will be paid for by American taxpayers.

Here’s what the Senate Republicans said on Twitter:

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton:

Texas senator Ted Cruz cast it as worsening the ongoing inflation:

Updated

The Guardian’s Lauren Aratani has more on American students’ mammoth debt load, how it became a political issue for Joe Biden and whether his proposed relief will make much of a difference:

America’s students have a debt problem. A big one. More than 45 million Americans – more than the population of California – now owe a collective $1.7tn in student debt.

The vast majority of the money is owed to the federal government, which has been backing or directly offering student loans for higher education since 1958. While student loans are not new in the United States, the amount of student debt has more than tripled over the last 16 years.

Joe Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday a cancellation of a large swath of student debt to address the crisis, the first large cancellation in US history. Borrowers making under $125,000 could see $10,000 shaved off their debt. Most borrowers will qualify for some cancellation. For at least 15 million, that means complete erasure of their debt.

Student debt will remain a hot political issue. Understanding the impact of such a dramatic policy requires unpacking the student debt crisis, beginning with its origins.

Biden to announce $10,000 in student debt relief: media reports

President Joe Biden will today announce as much as $10,000 in student debt relief for millions of American borrowers, as well as up to $20,000 in relief for borrowers who received a Pell Grant, according US media reports.

The White House has been debating how much student debt relief to offer for months, after Biden made the issue part of his pitch to voters on the 2020 campaign trail. The announcement of the aid is expected later today, once Biden returns to the White House from vacation.

According to Politico, “The loan relief will be limited to borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year or families earning less than $250,000. In addition, the White House plans to extend the moratorium on monthly payments and interest for a ‘final time’ through Dec. 31.”

Politico reports Biden’s fellow Democrats were lobbying him as recently as last night to aggressively cancel debt, while some groups say the amounts proposed won’t be enough:

Progressives, civil rights organizations and labor unions have all urged the Biden administration to provide large amounts — as much as $50,000 per borrower — of loan forgiveness to people across-the-board. And they signaled on Tuesday their disappointment with any policy that stops short of sweeping relief.

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, made clear that $10,000 of debt relief per borrower would be insufficient for addressing the racial inequities in student loan debt. “If the rumors are true, we’ve got a problem,” Johnson said in a statement.

“President Biden’s decision on student debt cannot become the latest example of a policy that has left Black people — especially Black women — behind,” he added. “This is not how you treat Black voters who turned out in record numbers and provided 90 percent of their vote to once again save democracy in 2020.”

Updated

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports on the latest in Donald Trump’s response to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, in which the former president has apparently admitted to having documents he should not have at his Florida resort:

Donald Trump appeared to concede in his court filing surrounding the seizure of materials from his Florida resort that he unlawfully retained official government documents, as the former president argued that some of the documents collected by the FBI could be subject to executive privilege.

The motion submitted on Monday by the former president’s lawyers argued that a court should appoint a so-called special master to separate out and determine what materials the justice department can review as evidence due to privilege issues.

But the argument from Trump that some of the documents are subject to executive privilege protections indicates that those documents are official records that he is not authorized to keep and should have turned over to the National Archives at the end of the administration.

Updated

A Republican lawmaker who had his phone seized as part of an investigation into attempts to meddle with the 2020 election filed a lawsuit to stop the justice department from reviewing its data, Politico reports.

Federal agents took Pennsylvania House representative and Donald Trump ally Scott Perry’s phone earlier this month. The lawmaker has been mentioned as involved in the attempt by Trump to install a loyalist at the top of the justice department in order to interfere with the results of the 2020 election. He also is among the Republicans who asked Trump for a pardon.

“[F]ederal agents should not be given carte blanche to root around in Rep. Perry’s phone data looking for evidence that they hope might further their investigation,” the lawmaker’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit, Politico reports.

Democrats in a deeply conservative Florida district have chosen as their congressional candidate Rebekah Jones, a former health department employee who was a fierce critic of governor Ron DeSantis’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the New York Times reports.

Jones will go up against Republican congressman Matt Gaetz in a district viewed as a safe for the GOP, despite the lawmaker’s scandals. Jones burst into the public spotlight during the pandemic’s early months after being fired from her job and accusing DeSantis of mishandling Covid-19 cases, though she is under investigation herself. Here’s a brief recap from the Times:

That clash put a spotlight on Ms. Jones in 2020, when she claimed that she had been fired from her government job for refusing to suppress virus data from the public. In what became a monthslong saga, Ms. Jones filed a whistle-blower complaint, turned into a vocal critic of Mr. DeSantis and was eventually criminally charged with accessing a state computer and downloading a file without authorization.

The criminal case against Ms. Jones is pending. In May, an inspector general for the Department of Health found that three allegations that Ms. Jones had made against several health officials were “unsubstantiated.”

Updated

In Florida, Democrats picked Charlie Crist as their candidate to stand against governor Ron DeSantis in November, in what will be a test of whether voters are on board with the Republican’s culture war offensive:

Charlie Crist will challenge Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in November after trouncing Nikki Fried, the state agriculture commissioner, in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

Crist, a former Republican governor of Florida who switched parties and became a Democratic congressman, fought a campaign touting his experience in office and opposition to the 15-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis.

In his victory speech in St Petersburg, Crist promised that if elected he will on his first day in office sign an executive order overturing the abortion law.

And he pledged to end the White House hopes of “wannabe dictator” DeSantis, who is tipped as a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. DeSantis has signed a raft of culture war legislation in Florida, attacking LBGTQ+ rights and “woke” corporations.

Here’s more from Reuters on the Democratic victory in upstate New York last night:

A New York Democrat who campaigned on abortion rights and the future of US democracy has won a special congressional election in a swing district, a victory that Democrats hope could signal a fundamental shift in national voter sentiment ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro 51.3% to 48.7%, with 99% of the vote counted, Edison Research said, after a hard-fought contest for an open seat in New York’s 19th congressional District, which spans part of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains region and is known as a bellwether.

The election took on outsized national importance and became a testing ground for both parties’ campaign strategies. Ryan made the US supreme court’s decision to overturn abortion rights a centrepiece of his campaign, mobilising Democrats outraged by the ruling. Molinaro focused on crime and soaring inflation that voters say is their most pressing concern.

Democrats have the slimmest of majorities in Congress, and thus it’s not hard to see how they could lose the House and potentially the Senate in the November midterms.

Joe Biden’s unpopularity is one thing working against them, and then there’s the historic tendency for the party in power to lose big in their first midterm – as Donald Trump found out in 2018, and Barack Obama eight years before that.

The lesson Democrats are drawing from Pat Ryan’s victory over Republican Marc Molinaro in a closely divided upstate New York House district is that this will be no ordinary year. Ryan won by capitalizing on the supreme court’s Dobbs decision ending nearly a half-century of nationwide abortion rights, and Democrats are no doubt hoping the dynamic repeats in races across the country.

Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report largely agreed that Ryan’s victory indicated Democratic voters were unusually fired up, but warned that may not translate to a continued majority in the House:

Surprise election win signals Democrats may be stronger than they appear

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Democrats scored a victory in upstate New York last night, when a candidate who had campaigned on protecting abortion rights triumphed over his Republican challenger for a vacant seat in the House of Representatives. The victory has given the party hope that they have a shot at keeping their majorities in Congress in November’s midterm election, despite President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and voters’ historical tendency to punish the party holding the White House. Expect to hear plenty more about what this result portends today.

Here’s what else is on the agenda:

  • Biden is heading back to the White House from vacation in Delaware, and is expected to make public his long-anticipated decision on student debt relief.

  • Washington has announced $3bn more in military aid for Ukraine on the country’s independence day, which will go towards long-term improvements to its defenses.

  • Ballot counting continues in the special election for Alaska’s vacant House seat, with the Democratic candidate maintaining her lead.

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