From WWW.FOXNEWS.COM
A public interest attorney filed a lawsuit Tuesday morning against the Department of Education to block President Biden’s “illegal” move to cancel more than $500 billion in student loan debt.
Biden, last month, announced that he would cancel $10,000 of federal student loan debt for certain borrowers making less than $125,000 per year, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
Frank Garrison, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, brought the suit against the Department of Education Tuesday in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Garrison and his attorneys at the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a temporary restraining order to prevent the loan handout from going into effect.
Garrison qualifies for the congressionally authorized Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, meaning he will receive debt forgiveness after making 10 years of payments on his student loans.
The Biden administration’s new handout would stick Garrison with a new state tax bill which he would not have under his existing PSLF program, as Indiana plans to tax the upcoming student loan cancelation as income.
His lawyers argue Garrison “will be stuck with a tax bill that makes him financially worse off than continuing with his repayment program under PSLF.”
“He did not ask for cancelation, doesn’t want it, and has no way to opt out of it,” the Pacific Legal Foundation said in a release Tuesday.
Garrison and his attorneys are arguing that the Biden administration turning to the HEROES Act, which allows the government to modify loans to assist veterans and their families as needed during times of war or other national emergencies, is a “flimsy pretext for a major policy chance that Congress has declined to enact.”
“Congress did not authorize the executive branch to unilaterally cancel student debt,” said Caleb Kruckenberg, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. “It’s flagrantly illegal for the executive branch to create a $500 billion program by press release, and without statutory authority or even the basic notice and comment procedure for new regulations.”
Attorney Michael Poon, in an interview with Fox News Digital on Tuesday, maintained that Congress makes the law and “you can’t have the executive modifying or waiving the law.”
“That is just unconstitutional,” Poon told Fox News Digital. “The law says you have to repay student loans. Biden is ignoring those laws, and he can’t do that.”… (Read more)