Congressional Democrats addressed a small rally outside the White House grounds on Wednesday calling on President Joe Biden to forgive all federally held student loans through executive action.
The rally was organized by student loan activists and members of the NAACP Youth & College division and featured remarks by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and several members of the House Progressive Caucus, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, California Rep. Ro Khanna, and Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
“The Progressive Caucus has been pushing for a year and a half since this president came into office to say, ‘President Biden, you have the opportunity to make a difference for 45 million Americans across this country by canceling student debt,'” Jayapal told the crowd of roughly two dozen people. “Let’s go get this done, let’s keep up the organizing, and let’s bring relief to our economy because our economy will grow when we cancel this student debt and bring relief to our families across the country.”
Two-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders used the occasion to call for more taxes on billionaires as a means to pay for student loan forgiveness, mentioning by name Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is worth an estimated $177 billion.
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“People will say, ‘Well, if you cancel student debt, isn’t that an expensive proposition?’ And the answer is, ‘It is an expensive proposition,'” Sanders said. “So, then we got to figure out a way to cover it. How do we cover it? I’ll tell you how we can cover it. Maybe you’ll ask Mr. Bezos to start paying his fair share of taxes.”
Liberal activists and Democratic politicians have been calling on President Joe Biden to use executive action to forgive at least $10,000 in federally held student loans since he took office in January 2021, but, aside from repeatedly extending a freeze on federal student loan payments, the administration has thus far not moved to forgive loans, despite publicly flirting with the idea.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner at the Wednesday rally, Khanna said that forgiving student loans would help Biden politically ahead of a midterm election in which Republicans are widely expected to wrest control of Congress away from Democrats but noted that he had been calling for the cancellation of federal student loans since he co-led Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign.
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“People are hurting,” Khanna said. “Cost of living has gone up. Rents have gone up. We have to relieve this burden on young people who have thousands of dollars of debt. It’s just not fair, and they’re hurting right now in an economy where cost of living is increasing.”
