The fight over student loan forgiveness at the Supreme Court

Transcript

NIALA: Good morning! Welcome to Axios Today!

It’s Tuesday, February 28th.

I’m Niala Boodhoo.

Here’s what we’re covering today: the race to save fading Black history. But first, the fight over student debt forgiveness at the Supreme Court. That’s today’s One Big Thing.

The fight over student debt forgiveness at the Supreme Court

NIALA: The Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today about President Biden's student loan Forgiveness plan. Borrowers have been in limbo since last summer, and if Biden's plan is successful, more than 40 million people could have up to $20,000 of their federal student loan debt canceled.

Here to share what we need to know about these arguments is The Washington Post’s Danielle Douglas- Gabriel. Hi Danielle. Welcome back to Axios Today!

DANIELLE DOUGLAS-GABRIEL: Thanks for having me.

NIALA: So Danielle, the Supreme Court's actually hearing two cases on this today. Can you give us a preview of these lawsuits, challenging student loan forgiveness?

DANIELLE: Sure. So one of the cases is called Biden v. Nebraska, and that involves six Republican-led states that are saying that not only did the president overstep his authority with the student loan program. But also, the program threatens revenue that their state entities could receive, if the student loan forgiveness goes into effect.

For instance, Missouri, which, uh, has a quasi state entity known as Mohela, this is a company that services student loans for the federal government. The idea from Missouri is if student loans are forgiven, that's less money for Mohela to make, which affects also the state, so it all would hurt Missouri.

Then the other lawsuit that's at play here is the Department of Education v. Brown. Now this involves two borrowers who say that they're not going to fully benefit from the program. One of the borrowers would is eligible for $10,000 worth of student loan forgiveness, but not the full 20 because he never received a Pell Grant. This is a form of financial aid for low income students and he was not eligible. The other borrower involved in the case is completely ineligible for the program because she has one of these old bank based loans known as FFELL loans. Now up until September, those loans could have qualified for the program if people consolidated into a direct loan. But the Department of Education excluded those loans and therefore made this particular borrower and hundreds of thousands of others ineligible for forgiveness.

NIALA: Last August, the Justice Department released a memo that said the HEROES Act authorized the Education Secretary to, “alleviate the hardship that Federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies.” How will the HEROES Act affect these Supreme Court cases?

DANIELLE: I think what is really interesting here is that this is the authority that the White House is saying is the crux of the president's authority here in order to forgive student loans. And was really intended initially to help members of the military not have to pay student loan, interest and principal while they were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the statute itself is broad enough, at least to the White House's, thinking that it could be applicable in the case of any kind of national emergency. In this case, the pandemic would stand as an opportunity for the president to alleviate financial burdens of people who actually may be worse for the national emergency than they would've been if the pandemic had never occurred. And that is kind of the premise here.

NIALA: What are you expecting to hear from the justices today that might indicate where they stand on this?

DANIELLE: So, the Department of Education, White House, the Biden administration saying neither of these plaintiffs have standing to bring these lawsuits. Meaning that they cannot prove that they will be harmed if this program were to go forth. And if the justices focus on that question, the most, a lot of the legal scholars that I've spoken with say perhaps the Biden administration has a good chance of the program being upheld.

Now, if the justices focused on the merits, particularly the application of HEROES in this case. And also if the justices start questioning the major questions doctrine. This is essentially whether the executive branch could enact any kind of policy sweeping policy that can have, big economic impact without Congress having a say. Then there is a good chance that the court may side with the plaintiffs in these two cases. Even if this is unsuccessful, I still think this administration will go down in history as perhaps ushering in the largest amount of debt relief and debt forgiveness relative to any other democratic or Republican administration in recent memory.

NIALA: Danielle Douglas-Gabriel covers the economics of higher education for The Washington Post. Thanks, Danielle.

DANIELLE: Thank you.

NIALA: Coming up: preserving important sites in Black history.

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The race to save fading Black history

NIALA: Welcome back to Axios Today. I'm Niala Boodhoo.

Around the country, sites that are significant to black history are disappearing, sparking a rush to preserve them before they're lost to climate change and urban renewal. Axios’ Race and Justice reporter Russell Contreras has worked with our local reporters around the country to understand this shifting landscape, and he joins us now on this final day of Black History Month.

Russ, what are the kind of sites that historians and local communities are worried about getting damaged or demolished?

RUSSELL CONTRERAS: Well, Niala, they run the gamut. I mean, there are some facilities that were historical hotels like in Alabama where activists planned the Montgomery, uh, bus boycott. Then there's some places like in Albuquerque where Miles Davis performed. There's a hotel called the Rossonian Hotel, it's in the heart of Denver's Black Five Points neighborhood. This is a place where Billy Holiday once performed, the area was called the Harlem of the West. It just sits there and it's been part of an ongoing fight about what to do with this building.

There's also Houston's Freedmen's Town, it was an area built by emancipated people. And I visited Freedmen's Town and I found out that there was a that was believed to have been connected to the Underground Railroad to Mexico. Storms before Hurricane Harvey had destroyed the home, and the officials just ended up raising it because it was unsound. Historians say places like this are important because we don't have a lot of documents about the Underground Railroad to Mexico, or a lot of things about slavery or enslavement that wasn't recorded after the Civil War in oral histories. So when we lose places like this, we lose the evidence about our narrative history. In fact, I talked to preservation activist Brent Leggs. He was talking about what is lost when we lose these sites and we don't preserve them.

BRENT LEGGS: Not only do we lose memory and legacy, we lose the opportunity to leverage the power of place and historic preservation to revitalize historic Black neighborhoods. What's beautiful about historic preservation is it reduces the gap between space and time, unlike any other form of history.

NIALA: That's Brent Leggs, executive Director of the African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

Russ, what kind of efforts are preservation activists like Brent Leggs doing on a community level to try to protect this history?

RUSSELL: Well, they're giving out grants to save some black heritage places for example, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund is working to save around 500 of these places. They range from churches to schools. They've awarded millions of dollars in grants.

Black churches in particular are, has been a focus of the fund because the Black churches played such a role in organizing local communities. They also played a role in the Underground railroad up north, so preserving churches tell us a history about the Civil Rights movement going all the way back to enslavement. There's also an effort by the National Park Service to preserve sites connected in Mississippi to the murder of Emmett Till and to the Mississippi Freedom Project.

NIALA: Are there other federal efforts, or does all of that tend to focus on the National Park Service, does it fall to them to try to preserve and memorialize these places?

RUSSELL: There are efforts in the federal level, but also statewide. There were a group of activists I talked to a few years ago that were going around trying to find sites related to, the lynching of Mexican Americans in Texas, for example, it was a group called, Refused to Forget. They were adamant that we should be putting memorials on these spots so that people can go to these sites.They can feel they can touch the area.

It’s tourism called reflective tourism or dialectical tourism where you go to a site, you engage with it, you feel, and you actually sit there in the moment. This place where Martin Luther King may have sat down in a table or an abolitionists were planning out how are you going to navigate liberation. It is a different experience and it's real important.

NIALA: Our Axios local reporters have taken some great photos of some of these sites. We'll include a link to that in our show notes. Russell Contreras is Axios’ Race and Justice reporter. Thanks, Russ.

RUSSELL: Thanks for having me.

All your Black artist recommendations

NIALA: And before we go – one last Black artist recommendation from a listener, as we close out this month…

Eric in Toledo Ohio has two playwrights to share… he says Donnetta Lavinia Grays is a playwright and actor with a “distinctive voice in her writing and a vision that's uncompromising and urgent and timeless”

…and he says James Ijames is the quote “rare playwright who combines seriousness of purpose with a killer sense of comedy.” Ijames’ play “Fat Ham” is headed for Broadway next month.

Thanks again to you all who wrote in with great Black artists – we have a list in our show notes today, so check that out.

And that does it for us. I’m Niala Boodhoo - thanks for listening - stay safe and we’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.