Hilgers joins lawsuit challenging Biden’s latest effort to diminish college student loan debt

TOPEKA — Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and peers in 10 other states, including Nebraska, filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against President Joe Biden and the U.S. Department of Education challenging an effort to reduce the burden of college student debt by reducing monthly loan payments to near zero.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided last year in a legal dispute involving a separate Biden student-debt order that the president didn’t have unilateral authority to delete financial obligations of college students. The nation’s highest court said such action required approval of Congress.

“Once again, the Biden administration has decided to steal from the poor and give to the rich,” said Kobach, who campaigned two years ago on a pledge to file multiple lawsuits against Biden. “He is forcing people who did not go to college, or who worked their way through college, to pay for the loans of those who ran up exorbitant student debt. This coalition of Republican attorneys general will stand in the gap and stop Biden.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, also a Republican, said he intended to join with Arkansas in a separate student loan debt lawsuit.

Biden said on social media that he would continue to fight to make certain that “higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity. I’m not backing down.”

The Supreme Court’s decision last summer blocked Biden’s strategy to outright cancel an estimated $430 billion in federal loan debt because the action required expenditure of taxpayer money to accomplish and the legislative branch hadn’t endorsed the policy. In that initial case, Kansas was among six states that challenged Biden.

“Despite that loss, and in completely brazen fashion, the president pressed ahead anyway and implemented another version of the student loan forgiveness program,” Kobach said during a news conference at the Capitol. “Not since the Civil War era has there been a sitting president attempting to defy the Supreme Court in this manner.”

Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers was among those joining the coalition in the new lawsuit.

“In Biden v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court made clear that the President cannot unilaterally cancel billions of dollars of student debt. President Biden has refused to accept the Nebraska decision and is now trying an end-run-around it, following a different pathway to the same illegal result,” Hilgers said in a news release. “Today, we joined a lawsuit that ensures this latest lawless action does not go unanswered.”

Kobach said the new 11-state lawsuit filed in Wichita contended the executive branch didn’t have power to amend student loan repayment plans, which would essentially do away with at least $157 billion in student debt. The Kansas attorney general said Biden was guilty of violating the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine,” which presumed Congress held authority to assign consequential policy decisions to a federal agency.

“We look forward to seeing the president’s attorneys in court,” Kobach said. “The law simply does not allow Biden to do what he wants to do. Biden is trying to exercise the powers of a king rather than the powers of a president in a constitutional republic.”

The Kansas suit was also joined by attorneys general from Iowa, Texas, Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina and Utah. The attorneys general intend to seek a temporary injunction against Biden in the U.S. District Court.

Kobach was asked whether he believed Biden was attempting to persist with the student loan agenda to curry favor from young voters in an election year.

“I think that’s a possibility,” the attorney general said. “It could be purely coincidence, but the first student loan plan happened in 2022 in that election cycle and it could be purely coincidence that the president is celebrating and making public statements about this student loan plan in the election cycle of 2024.”

This article first appeared in the Iowa Capital Dispatch, a sister site of the Nebraska Examiner in the States Newsroom network.