Eleni Schirmer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Concordia University Social Justice Center in Montreal, is an organizer for the Debt Collective. Louise Seamster is an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of Iowa, and a nonresident fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
The Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of debt for tens of millions of Americans has faced endless pressure. Just this week the House of Representatives voted to repeal it. But the suit against it, brought by six Republican-led states, has received much less scrutiny. That’s because the Supreme Court issued “certiorari before judgment,” meaning the suit did not first have to wend its way through lower courts. Its factual claims haven’t been adequately tested. They’ve hardly even been aired.
So we decided to do the fact-checking ourselves. We filed public records requests and reviewed almost a thousand pages of internal financial documents, emails and other communications from the parties in the case, as well as court filings and the transcript of oral arguments at the Supreme Court in February.
We found that the states’ most fundamental justification for bringing the case — that canceling student loans could leave a Missouri-based loan authority unable to meet its financial obligations to the state — is false. As our research shows, and the loan authority’s own documents confirm, even with the new policy in place, its revenues from...
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