Biden says supreme court ‘misinterpreted the constitution’ as he announces new student debt relief plan – live

Speaking from the White House briefing room, secretary of education Miguel Cardona said he “strongly disagreed” with the supreme court’s decision and vowed to “open up an alternative path to debt relief for as many borrowers as possible, as quickly as possible”.

In ruling against the Biden administration’s landmark student debt forgiveness plan, the court had “ruled against more than 40 million working families”, Cardona said.

We’re not talking about the millionaires who benefited from the billions in tax giveaway a few years ago. We’re talking about low and middle income families recovering from the worst pandemic in a century.

He said it was “outrageous” that Republican members of Congress had “fought so hard against the program that would have helped millions of their own constituents”.

Cardona added:

Today, I want to assure our students, our borrowers and families across America – our fight is not over.

Vice-president Kamala Harris has spoken out against the supreme court’s ruling today striking down a Colorado civil rights law which compels businesses and organizations to treat same-sex couples equally.

The court’s decision “departs from decades of jurisprudence by creating an exception to protections against discrimination in public accommodations”, a statement from Harris reads.

On the last day of Pride Month, the Supreme Court has paved the way for businesses across our nation to discriminate in the name of “free expression”—against the LGBTQI+ community, racial and religious minorities, the disability community, and women.

At a time when we celebrate hard-won advancements in LGBTQI+ rights, this decision threatens future progress.

She added that she and President Joe Biden would “continue to rigorously enforce federal anti-discrimination protections and fight for the right of all people to participate equally in our society”.

We have a clip from Joe Biden’s speech where he announced a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today said his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.

Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back.

To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.

Hardly anyone successfully makes it through the process. Between 1997 and 2022, an average of seven people successfully made it through the process each year, according to Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi.

The supreme court did not say on Friday why it was rejecting the case (it takes four votes on the court to grant review) and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only two justices who noted their dissent from the denial. Jackson wrote an opinion saying the fifth circuit had committed “two egregious analytical errors that ought to be corrected”.

First, she wrote, even though Mississippi voters removed a crime in 1950 and added two more in 1968, the substance of many of the original crimes from 1890 remained intact. That means that the list is still discriminatory, she wrote in a dissent that was joined by Sotomayor.

“The “remaining crimes” from [the list of crimes] pernicious origin still work the very harm the 1890 Convention intended – denying Black Mississippians the vote,” she wrote.

The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.

Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit.

“We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.

It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen percent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.

Read the full story by my colleague Sam Levine here.

In his speech at the White House, Joe Biden repeated his criticism of the Republicans who led the successful effort to block his plan to cancel some federal student loan debt.

Biden called out those Republican members who received “hundreds of thousands for themselves” in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans that were later forgiven, but who had strongly opposed his student debt plan.

The hypocrisy is stunning.

The new student debt relief plan will be implemented under the federal government’s rulemaking process, the White House said, and it seems like it will take months to get the program up and running.

The education department today issued a notice announcing the plan, will hold a virtual public hearing on 18 July and “finalize the issues to be addressed through rulemaking and begin the negotiated rulemaking sessions this fall. The Department will complete this rulemaking as quickly as possible,” according to the White House.

In addition, the White House said the education department will institute “a 12-month ‘on-ramp’ to repayment, running from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, so that financially vulnerable borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent, reported to credit bureaus, placed in default, or referred to debt collection agencies.”

Federal student loan payments have been paused since Covid-19 broke out in March 2020, and were set to restart this October. The Biden administration said the “on-ramp” is intended to provide relief to financially struggling borrowers who can’t afford to start making payments again right away.

The Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong is taking the blog over now to keep you posted on this developing story.

Joe Biden directed blame for the apparent demise of his student debt relief program both at the Republicans who sued over the plan, and at the supreme court justices who ruled against it.

“I think the court misinterpreted the constitution,” Biden said. Asked whether he gave Americans “false hope” by promising $430bn in total debt relief only for it to be blocked in court, he replied, “I didn’t give any false hope. The question was whether or not I would do even more than was requested. What I did I felt was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done.”

“But the Republican snatched away the hope that they were given,” Biden said.

“This new path is legally sound,” Biden said in announcing his new attempt at student loan relief.

“It’s going to take longer, but in my view it’s the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible. I’m directing my team to move as quickly as possible on law,” the president said.

Joe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.

“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.

Joe Biden has started his speech by criticizing the Republicans who successfully sued to block his student loan forgiveness program.

“The money was literally about to go out the door, and then Republican elected officials and special interests stepped in. They said no, no, literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives,” the president said.

“You know, these Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans. Republican state officials sued my administration, attempting to block relief, including to millions of their own constituents.”