ROCK AND A HARD PLACE — President Joe Biden has just 12 days to meet his self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline to decide whether he will use executive action to forgive thousands of dollars in student loans for millions of Americans.
Timing matters here: The president’s long-delayed decision is now set to arrive around Labor Day, traditionally the start of the fall campaign. For months, Democrats have been pushing Biden to announce the loan forgiveness — and quickly — in hopes it could give the party a much-needed boost of enthusiasm among young voters in the midterm elections.
While Biden is expected to extend the payment pause, the White House has offered few hints about what the president will do about the loan forgiveness. Biden has been slow to embrace the expensive and, depending on who you ask, controversial, cancellation of any amount of student debt. When Nightly asked about Biden’s next decision, the White House responded with a response from press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s Aug. 9 briefing, in which she said the president would have a decision by the end of the month. .
“When it comes to canceling — look, I just said the president understands intimately the burden — the burden that a student loan has on families, it puts on families. And we’ll just continue to evaluate our options for cancellations. So, no decision has been made on this,” she said.
It won’t be as simple as deciding whether $10,000 — the base amount the administration has sought — is the right amount to forgive. Biden will also have to decide whether he wants to target the relief to certain borrowers, such as those making less than $125,000. Progressives are calling for a universal pardon — though the president has indicated his preference for restrictions on who gets the relief.
Whatever he decides, Biden is bound to spark a roaring debate.
“The only thing missing from this discussion is people with an opinion,” Jonathan Fansmith, director of government relations at the American Council on Education, which represents 1,700 colleges and universities, told Nightly.
Loan forgiveness will fuel the GOP’s talking points of big government spending, with a populist dimension. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office put it: “Democrats want working families to eat the debt of the elite in high school.” On the campaign trail, Republicans like it Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance has struck a similar tune, calling loan cancellation a “massive windfall for the rich, the college-educated, and most of all, the corrupt administrators of America’s universities.”
Many Democrats must also be frustrated. Progressives have called on Biden to go home or cancel up to $50,000 in student loan borrowers without income limits. As Fansmith put it, the left wing of the party might dismiss a lower figure than that as a “half-gesture”.
Then you have the school of moderate Democrats — some shudder at the prospect of just $10,000. Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, in a speech this summer, criticized the notion that loan forgiveness will do anything to “address the absurd cost of college or fix our broken student loan program.” Bennet supports loan forgiveness only if it is linked to other reforms to fix the credit system.
His address was included in another criticism of the loan forgiveness – plan price. At about $230 billion if Biden moves forward with the $10,000 income-based plan, Bennett argued that the money could meet other policy priorities, such as a two-year extension of the child tax credit.
Among the general electorate, a majority of Americans — 55 percent — generally support a move to forgive up to $10,000 of a person’s student loan debt. But that support narrows as the dollar rises, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll in June. And Americans, at 82 percent, would prefer the government focus on making college more affordable, while just 16 percent said debt forgiveness should take priority.
The division is clearer along partisan lines. An Economist/YouGov poll from July showed that only 28 percent of Republicans support the pardon, compared to an overwhelming 70 percent of Democrats.
Fansmith notes that Biden could avoid the tense middle ground by going in or out. The president can go ahead with universal forgiveness and satisfy a larger group of Democrats, or he can announce that he has decided against credit relief all together — acknowledging the reality that debt forgiveness is really just “a handout.” group for a gunshot wound” when it comes to the underlying problems driving the student debt crisis.
“The middle ground usually leaves most people unsatisfied,” Fansmith said. “That’s what they say – the sign of a good compromise is that everyone is a little bit unhappy. Well, that might be good for a compromise, but it’s not good for political results.”
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– Judge: Prosecutors can’t enforce Michigan abortion ban: A Michigan judge today blocked district attorneys from enforcing the state’s 1931 ban on abortion for the foreseeable future, after two days of witness testimony from abortion experts, providers and the state’s chief medical officer. The decision comes after the state Court of Appeals said earlier this month that district attorneys were not covered by a May order and could enforce the ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. David Kallman, an attorney representing two Republican district attorneys, said an appeal is planned.
– California voters want Biden to retire – and see Newsom as a top contender to succeed him: Californians overwhelmingly do not want Biden to seek another term and see Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom as the leading contender to succeed him, according to a new poll. A new Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies poll of California voters underscored the risk for Biden and the potential for Newsom. Sixty-one percent of voters polled online from Aug. 9-15 said Biden should not run in 2024, including about half of Democratic voters and a majority of independents. Newsom and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — who finished first in the 2020 California primary — tied as Democratic and independent voters’ top choice to replace Biden, followed by Vice President Kamala Harris.
– The Court of Appeals upholds the decision to release the DOJ memorandum on the criminal prosecution of Trump: A federal appeals court ruled today that the Justice Department must make public a 2019 internal memo by top lawyers there about whether then-President Donald Trump’s actions investigated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation on ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia constituted felony prosecutors. would normally charge. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Justice Department failed to meet its legal burden to show that the memo from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel was part of a genuine deliberative process advising then-Attorney General William Barr on how to address sensitive issues left unresolved when Mueller’s investigation ended in March 2019.
– Louisiana officials block New Orleans flood funding for abortion: A Louisiana commission is blocking the approval of flood control funds in New Orleans because of city officials’ opposition to the state’s strict abortion ban. The Louisiana State Bond Commission has voted twice to delay approval of a $39 million line of credit for a power station to run New Orleans’ septic pumps that would protect the city’s 384,000 residents from flooding and have been described as critical about the city’s ability to adapt. to climate change.
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS – Liz Truss’s Tory allies in Washington adore her. Democrats who oppose Brexit don’t believe her. Georgetown did wonders for her intellectual capacity, he writes Ryan Heath AND Ella Creamer.
Talk to 19 people who have worked with Truss — as POLITICO did, from the White House and Congress to federal agencies, think tanks and the British diplomatic ranks — and you’ll hear just as many different versions of the woman who will become the wife of Britain. the next prime minister.
This represents a branding problem in Washington for Truss, who needs bipartisan support to have any chance of securing a long-sought bilateral trade deal with the United States.
Working most clearly in her favor is simply that she is no Boris Johnson. The White House shed few tears for the political undoing of the outgoing prime minister. But that doesn’t mean Truss will be embraced.
While close advisers prefer to call her “values-driven” and “pragmatic”, colleagues in London admit she can be “ideological”. One thing is certain: Britain’s top diplomat is not afraid to ruffle feathers.
ASK THE ‘CUPOLOGISTS’ — More than 18 months after the events of January 6, 2021, Americans are still struggling to understand what happened that day, writes Joshua Zeitz.
So… it was a mutiny? A coup, albeit a failed one? A political protest gone wrong? A pathetic display of white supremacy cosplay or the portrait of something darker and more dangerous in our nation’s not-too-distant future?
The oft-repeated assertion that “this is not who we are”—that January 6 was an aberration—ignores a deep tradition of anti-democratic violence that runs through the veins of American history—from the mob that killed the abolished newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 to Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s, from the Civil War itself to Reconstruction and Redemption, Jim Crow and the destruction of Native American nations in the service of building homes for free whites in the American West. We may not be who we are, but we are certainly who we were.
So what happened on January 6th? To help answer that question, POLITICO Magazine convened a roundtable of distinguished scholars and writers—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University; Ryan McMaken, editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian; Scott Althaus, professor of political science and director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Matt Cleary, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University—who specialize in the study of political instability and polarization, not just in the United States, but globally. Over the course of an hour, they approached this question from multiple disciplines, different regional and historical frameworks, and different ideological perspectives. Read their conversation here.
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