President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s new commitment to student loan forgiveness and borrower assistance at the White House on October 4, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietch | Getty Images
The Biden administration’s sweeping student loan forgiveness plan was again temporarily blocked by a Missouri judge on Thursday, just one day after a federal judge in Georgia said a restraining order against the relief would lapse.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Shelp in St. Louis, appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump, announced the latest ruling. preliminary injunction Opposes Biden’s relief plan.
As a result of this order, the U.S. Department of Education is once again prohibited from forgiving people’s student loans until Mr. Shelp has had a chance to rule on the matter.
The latest order marks a judicial flogging for federal student loan holders as a lawsuit filed by seven Republican-led states challenging Mr. Biden’s relief package is sent back to court from Georgia to Missouri. A limit of 24 hours was set.
The states that filed the lawsuit, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota, and Ohio, allege that the U.S. Department of Education’s new debt cancellation efforts are illegal.
Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Randall Hall of Georgia. Found He argued that his court could not be the venue for the lawsuit because his state lacked standing to sue against the relief plan.
Hall ordered the case to be transferred to Missouri because the states argue that Biden’s plan would most harm student loan servicing company Mohela, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority.
When CNBC broke the news Thursday that the restraining order would expire, consumer advocates and borrowers hoped the Biden administration would try to move quickly on loan forgiveness plans for tens of millions of Americans. did. The Department of Education is already preparing loan servicers to begin reducing and eliminating people’s debt.
But Schelp cited this very possibility as the reason for delaying the administration while considering the case.
“Allowing Defendants to discharge the student loan debt at issue here would prevent this Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court from reviewing this case on the back end, and would prevent Defendants’ actions from being reviewed on the back end. “It will allow them to avoid scrutiny,” Schelp said. I wrote.
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