Social Security

Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, joins CBS News’ Lilia Luciano and Lana Zak to discuss the importance of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, as the the Supreme Court hears arguments on the policy.

“It’s interesting that we’ve seen other courts, which are not seen as liberal courts, side with the president,” Persis Yu, deputy executive director at Student Borrower Protection Center, told CNBC Make It in November. “I think it’s through a very extraordinary reading of standing law and the authority of the courts that they came to this decision.”

Mike Pierce, the founder and executive director of the Student Borrowers Protection Center – one of several advocacy organizations rallying – said he believed “the court will side with 40 million people”. On the rightwing challenges to the loan relief plan, Pierce said: “This is just another example of Republican officials using the courts to play politics. These are President Biden’s political opponents. Canceling student debt is wildly popular, particularly with President Biden’s…

“The court must see these lawsuits as the partisan sham they really are and protect the Biden administration’s historic relief plan,” said Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “Borrowers deserve better than to be treated like political pawns — lives and livelihoods are at stake.”

“The borrowers most likely to struggle disproportionately come from lower-income households — the families least prepared to weather the public health and economic crises that gripped the country in 2020,” Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said Friday on a call that the White House had arranged for reporters.

While the justices and attorneys debate these broad legal questions inside the court house, hundreds borrowers and advocates will be rallying outside. The idea behind the gathering, which a coalition of student loan advocacy organizations, civil rights groups, labor unions and others is hosting is to “keep bringing the story back to the people that are going to get hurt if the Court takes away people’s right to student debt relief,” said Mike…

“This is an extraordinary nearly unprecedented outcome for lawsuits that were filed just a few months ago,” Mike Pierce, a former senior regulator, attorney, and executive director of Student Borrowers Protection Center (SBPC), said at the SDCC town hall. “We’ve skipped through every step of the normal judicial process — no finding of fact by a trial court — to a rapid and hasty rush to get this policy in front of a…

Proponents of the relief include two top labor unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers; a coalition of city and county governments nationwide; 21 Democratic-led states and Washington, DC; and liberal-leaning advocacy groups such as the Student Borrower Protection Center and NAACP.

“This is a lot of people, 40 million, and about half would be debt free as a result of this program,” said Persis Yu, managing counsel of the Student Borrower Protection Center, one of the groups hosting the protest. “The other thing that’s really important to recognize is that as life-changing as this would be, it would be devastating for them if it doesn’t happen.”

Groups across the country wanting at least some student debt erased plan to rally on Tuesday in front of the Supreme Court building, including some from Georgia. The New Georgia Project Action Fund is mobilizing about 45 young borrowers of color for a bus trip from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., to attend the rally.

A “People’s Rally for Student Debt Cancellation” protest of the plan in front of the Court is scheduled for that day, and co-sponsors of the rally include the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), the Debt Collective, the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), the NAACP, MoveOn, the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), and the National Education Association (NEA).

The rally is planned for the day the Court will hear oral arguments in two cases challenging the Biden Administration’s student debt cancellation program. Legal experts from the Student Borrower Protection Center, National Consumer Law Center and Democracy Forward plan to attend the hearings.

“I don’t know many people in the world, and certainly none of the clients that I’ve ever worked with, who would say that, ‘all of a sudden, I can start making several hundred-dollar payments that I didn’t have to make the month before,’” Yu says. “It’s a big issue for older Americans, it’s a big issue for people with disabilities, it’s a big issue for communities of color, it’s a big issue for…

“The logical remedy for the harm that they said they suffered would be to expand the program, but that’s not what they’re asking for,” Yu said. “They’re asking for it to be completely invalidated for no one to get relief, and I think that’s how this is not genuinely about the borrowers who are excluded, but this is a politically motivated lawsuit as well.”