A federal judge in Southern Indiana has tossed out a lawsuit brought by an Indiana man working for a libertarian think tank claiming that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student debt per loan holder violates the law.
Pacific Institute attorney Frank Garrison claimed that the forgiveness of his debt–he’s on Year 6 of a 10-year student loan payment plan, and the Biden loan forgiveness would erase his debt–would burden him because his home state, Indiana, taxes loan forgiveness as income, which would, Garrison claims, cause him irreparable harm because he would have to pay tax. So because he would be inconvenienced to pay additional taxes, Garrison wanted the entire program scrapped. (Curiously, on the Pacific Institute website, the rationale for the lawsuit is very different: various claims that Biden and the Department of Ed don’t have authority to cancel the debt because something something Joe Biden declared the pandemic over and that the order referred to the wrong Act and it limits my personal liberties to not make me pay government-backed debt.
Judge Richard Young, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Garrison could not show an irreparable harm by the forgiveness of his debt because the Department has given loan holders the option to carry on paying their debt and opt out of the loan forgiveness program.