Teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten worked herself into a scream during a speech outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, comparing President Biden’s student loan handout to the COVID-19 small business loans of 2020.
Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), spoke at the Student Debt Crisis Center’s rally in Washington as Supreme Court justices heard a pair of challenges to Biden’s student loan debt handout, which would cancel $10,000 in federal student loans for individuals making less than $125,000 per year or households earning less than $250,000 annually as of 2020 or 2021.
The plan, which would also give an additional $10,000 in debt cancelation to recipients of Pell Grants, is estimated to cost taxpayers about $400 billion over the next three years, according to the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Weingarten compared the situation to when Congress passed a bipartisan $2.2 trillion stimulus package during the beginning stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, which established the Paycheck Protection Program and provided forgivable loans to small businesses.
SUPREME COURT REVIEWS STUDENT LOAN DEBT HANDOUT PLAN: HOW IT MAY IMPACT YOU
"If we go to college, and we stay in college, we need to actually make sure that it's affordable – that it doesn't take everything and everything that our families can do," she said. "And so that is why President Biden said we are going to deal with that … and the Secretary of Education has the right to do it."
"And frankly, and this is what really pisses me off," she said. "During the pandemic, we understood that small businesses were hurting, and we helped them, and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. Big businesses were hurting, and we helped them, and it didn't go to the Supreme Court to challenge it."
"All of a sudden, when it’s about our students, they challenge it, the corporations challenge it, the student loan lenders challenge it," she continued, screaming and jumping up and down. "That is that not right, that is not fair, and that is what we are fighting as well when we say cancel student debt. This is about the people, and it is about the people's future, and it is about all of your futures."
Supreme Court justices will hear a pair of challenges to the student loan debt handout, both of which involve questions about whether the Department of Education was authorized by Congress to advance the rule implementing Biden’s plan and followed the proper regulatory procedures.
Biden has claimed he has the authority to wipe student loan payments under a law known as the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act, which initially intended to benefit service members deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq by waiving their student loan debt or providing other relief.
Fox News’ Kristen Altus and Eric Revell contributed to this report.
