WASHINGTON – Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) spoke on the House Floor to comment on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recent ruling blocking the Department of Education’s borrower defense rule, which constitutes yet another shady route Biden has taken to enact massive loan “forgiveness” after the Supreme Court ruled his student loan scheme illegal.
Chairwoman Foxx’s remarks:
“I rise today to report to the House that Article III courts have once again protected the American people from extreme executive overreach.
“I am talking, of course, about the President’s so-called ‘borrower-defense’ rule. On Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the regulation in its tracks for now.
“This key decision gives strong reason to believe that the borrower-defense scheme will be permanently scuttled.
“Writing for the court, Judge Edith Jones said, ‘We assess a strong likelihood that the plaintiffs will succeed on the merits in demonstrating the Rule’s numerous statutory and regulatory shortcomings.’
“This is a grand slam for taxpayers and for every American who never stepped foot on a college campus yet have been forced to pay for others’ student debt.
“God Bless our republican system of checks and balances.”
BACKGROUND: Borrower defense is a process to forgive the student loan debt of borrowers, for example, who attended schools engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation such as false advertisements of job placement rates.
In 1994, the Education Department released borrower defense rules, which were rarely used over the next 20 years. In 2015, a large for-profit school closed, and the Obama administration used this opportunity to issue new regulations on borrower defense and encourage tens of thousands of borrowers - whether they were harmed or not - to apply to have their loans forgiven.
For the first 20 years of the rule, there were 59 claims. Then the Obama administration began encouraging frivolous applications and the applications jumped to more than 300,000. The Biden administration is continuing this Obama precedent to achieve the Democrat objective of massive student loan “forgiveness.”
