Biden vetoes GOP-led effort to kill his student debt relief plan

“I'm not going to back down on my efforts to help tens of millions of working- and middle-class families,” Biden said in a video message on Wednesday.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday swiftly vetoed Republican-led legislation that would have repealed his plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student debt for tens of millions of Americans.

GOP lawmakers, with the help of a handful of moderate Democrats, last week passed the resolution to nullify Biden’s student debt relief program, criticizing the plan as too costly for taxpayers and unfair to Americans who didn’t attend college.

“I'm not going to back down on my efforts to help tens of millions of working- and middle-class families,” Biden said in a video message on Wednesday. “That's why I'm going to veto this bill.”

The veto, which the White House previously threatened, is the fifth of Biden’s presidency. Earlier this year, Biden rejected Republican-led efforts to overturn other policies, including a Department of Labor rule on socially-responsible investing, the administration’s suspension of tariffs on solar panels and the District of Columbia’s law on police accountability.

Biden’s latest veto effectively cuts off the legislative effort to undo Biden’s student debt relief because Republicans won’t be able to win over enough Democrats to build the two-thirds majority needed in either chamber to override Biden’s rejection of the legislation.

But Biden’s student debt relief program remains in jeopardy at the Supreme Court.

The justices are preparing to rule in the coming weeks, potentially as early as Thursday, on whether to allow the Biden administration to proceed with the debt relief program. Republican state attorneys general and a conservative group are suing to stop the program, arguing that it’s an illegal abuse of executive power.

Progressives have already urged Biden to come up with an alternative path to canceling student debt if the Supreme Court rejects its first attempt, which is based on emergency powers tied to the Covid pandemic.

“I remain committed to continuing to make college affordable and providing this critical relief to borrowers as they work to recover from a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden wrote in his veto message on Wednesday.

In the House, Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez of Washington voted in favor of the GOP resolution to block Biden’s debt relief.

In the Senate, Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Jon Tester (Mont.) and Independent Sen. Krysten Sinema (Ariz.) joined with Republicans to pass the legislation.

Manchin blasted the program last week as a “reckless” plan that “forces hard-working taxpayers who already paid off their loans or did not go to college to shoulder the cost.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, who led the effort in that chamber to block student debt relief on Wednesday criticized Biden for ignoring the “bipartisan basis” on which Congress rebuked the plan.

“The President is sending a clear message that he is willing to force these ordinary Americans to bear the burden of paying off someone else’s student debt in addition to their own bills,” Cassidy said in a statement.