House Republicans passed a joint resolution Wednesday calling for an end to President Joe Biden's student loan debt forgiveness program.
The joint resolution, HJ Res. 45, led by Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., passed with a 218-203 vote, with two Democrats joining the Republican majority: Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.
Biden's program would forgive $10,000 of federal student loan debt or up to $20,000 if borrowers received a Pell Grant. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated the program will cost $300 billion to $900 billion over the next 10 years.
"President Biden's student loan transfer scheme shifts hundreds of billions of dollars of payments from student loan borrowers onto the backs of the American people," Good said in a news release. "I am proud to lead the fight against President Biden's reckless, unilateral, and unauthorized action that would unfairly penalize those who worked hard to pay off their loans or who never took them out in the first place. I am pleased that my Republican colleagues overwhelmingly supported my legislation on the House floor."
In a Statement of Administration Policy issued Monday, the White House said the resolution "is an unprecedented attempt to undercut our historic economic recovery and would deprive more than 40 million hard-working Americans of much-needed student debt relief." The statement said Biden would veto the measure if it reached its desk.
The resolution now heads to the Democratic-controlled Senate. Newsmax reached out to Cassidy for comment on its prospects of passing.
The fate of Biden's debt relief program is in the hands of the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in February whether the Department of Education properly used the HEROES Act of 2003, which gave student loan debt relief to soldiers fighting the War on Terror, as the basis for the program. It is one of the major cases on the court's docket, and a decision is expected in the coming weeks.