Student loan forgiveness: Biden to outline $10,000 debt relief plan – live | US politics

The day so far

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 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:

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

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.

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.”

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