AOC urges Biden to forgive student loan debt or lose ‘any chance’ of winning midterms

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New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a dire warning for President Joe Biden: his congressional majority is all but certain to be forced out of power in November unless he takes tangible action to improve Americans’ lives.

She made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview with The New Yorker, where the second-term progressive Democrat pointed to the White House’s hesitancy to take bold action through executive orders as hurting the president’s chances of helping Americans and scoring political victories along the way.

“The presidency is so much larger than just the votes in the legislature,” she told the publication, calling the hesitancy to use executive action “something that we saw with President Obama”.

“I think we’re seeing this dynamic perhaps extend a little bit into the Biden Administration, with a reluctance to use executive power. The president has not been using his executive power to the extent that some would say is necessary,” she said.

The congresswoman then pointed to student loan relief as one avenue where the Biden administration could and should use executive power to directly benefit the lives of millions of Americans. On this issue she is in agreement with not only her fellow progressives in the House but the Senate as well, where the idea has supporters as high ranking as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“One of the single most impactful things President Biden can do is pursue student-loan cancellation. It’s entirely within his power,” said Ms Ocasio-Cortez.

She then warned: “I can’t underscore how much the hesitancy of the Biden Administration to pursue student-loan cancellation has demoralised a very critical voting block that the president, the House, and the Senate need in order to have any chance at preserving any of our majority.”

The pressure to cancel some or all of the country’s student loan debt has grown and receded several times in recent months, and tends to come into the forefront when concerns about inaction in Congress and the inability of Democrats to move major legislation through the Senate are at their highest.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks come as Democrats are facing the prospect of their base being far less enthusiastic about defending their majority in the fall than are Republican-leaning voters in taking it back. An NBC News poll from January found that 61 per cent of Republicans are “very interested” in voting in the midterms, while just 47 per cent of Democratic voters told pollsters the same.

Mr Biden and other Democratic allies of the White House like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have disagreed over whether the president truly has the authority to forgive student loan debt directly. Mr Biden himself said last year that he didn’t believe he did, while Ms Pelosi called the idea “not even a discussion”.

Americans have accumulated about $1.7tn in student loan debt spread out between 46 million borrowers, according to a LendingTree analysis. The Department of Education boasts on its website that it lends more than $120 billion in financial aid to students every year.

Mr Biden indicated support for forgiving some student loan debt on an individual basis during his 2020 campaign for president, but the inability of Congress to move such a bill through the Senate makes any effort short of an executive order unlikely to see success.