Ashley Moody joins Attorney General push against Joe Biden student loan discharges

Florida’s Attorney General is standing up for taxpayers against potential student loan discharges and renegotiated payment terms, joining her Republican colleagues in other states in legal action.

The Missouri V. Biden lawsuit targets what a media release from Ashley Moody calls the Joe Biden “administration’s latest attempt to force Americans to pay someone else’s debt. The lawsuit targets what the federal government calls the “SAVE” Plan, which in reality will cost Americans $475 billion — $45 billion more than its last unlawful student loan plan,” according to Moody’s release.

The “Saving on a Valuable Education” plan “is the newest income-driven repayment (IDR) plan,” per the Department of Education, and it offers benefits for borrowers that include the elimination of “100% of remaining monthly interest for both subsidized and unsubsidized loans.”

These burdens can vary for borrowers based on when they happened to go to school, as that determines interest rates, with an arguably disproportionate burden on those who went to school before the low-interest rate period after the 2008 economic crash and before pandemic spending from Donald Trump and Biden.

For Moody and the other Attorneys General, however, the issue is the Biden administration “unilaterally trying to impose an extraordinarily expensive and controversial policy that he could not get through Congress” after “the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the President to force teachers, truckers, and farmers to pay for the student loan debt of other Americans — to the enormous tune of $430 billion.”

“This latest attempt to sidestep the Constitution is only the most recent instance in a long but troubling pattern of the President relying on innocuous language from decades-old statutes to impose drastic, costly policy changes on the American people without their consent,” the Attorneys General wrote.

“This rule unlawfully seeks to evade the limits Congress set out in statute for the IBR program. It also would gut the statutory purpose of providing loans. By their nature, loans require repayment except in extenuating circumstances. The Federal Government’s thresholds are set so high — arbitrarily so — that it creates a grant for most borrowers. In other words, unlike every other loan program, the majority of borrowers will receive a grant,” the AGs argue further in the court filing.

For Moody, restructuring student loan debt obligations is tantamount to taking food out of the mouths of the hungry.

“Last year, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s illegal attempt to force Americans to pay off someone else’s debt. Now, Biden thumbs his nose at the court like he has done with so many issues, including immigration, and does what he wants, trying again to mass-cancel student debt. We will fight in court to make sure that hard-working Americans, who are struggling to buy groceries thanks to Biden, are not on the hook for other people’s debt,” the second-term Republican from Plant City pledged.