Republicans Are Having a Full-Blown Meltdown Over Student Debt Forgiveness

President Joe Biden finally unveiled his long-awaited student debt forgiveness plan on Wednesday, pledging to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for most other borrowers, and resulting in such a flood of traffic to student loan websites that it temporarily crashed them. 

And Republicans in Congress are now very, very angry that millions of Americans will be less indebted to the federal government.

The GOP has noticeably splintered in recent months, mostly over former President Donald Trump. But on Wednesday, Republicans, from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on down to far-right backbenchers, almost uniformly characterized the modest student loan forgiveness plan—far short of the $50,000 progressives and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had called for—as a “socialist” giveaway to “elites” and, of course, “gender studies” majors. 

McConnell, who just a few short years ago shepherded through the Senate a tax reform law that disproportionately benefited corporations and wealthy Americans, called Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan “astonishingly unfair.”

“President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt,” McConnell said in a statement. 

Sen. Rick Scott, the Senate Republicans’ campaign chair and the wealthiest person in Congress by tens of billions of dollars, called it a “socialist handout” and an “added burden that will only further increase inflation.” (The Maoists at Goldman Sachs, by the way, think the overall impact on the economy will be minimal, according to the Financial Times.) 

Much of Scott’s wealth, by the way, comes from founding and leading a healthcare company, Columbia/HCA, which was charged with defrauding Medicare. The company later agreed to pay $1.7 billion in fines and admitted to multiple felonies for offenses that happened while Scott was running the company. 

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado charged that Biden should report the plan as a campaign expenditure because it’s a “scheme to buy votes.” 

Much of the criticism sought to pit blue-collar Americans against “gender studies” students who recklessly took on debt. 

“Didn’t go to college? Worked your way up the old fashioned way? Made a good living for your family?” tweeted Rep, Jim Jordan, one of the most right-wing members of the House who was infamously an employee of a public university. “Well, as a reward, Joe Biden will let you pay for the student loans of the wealthy ‘gender studies’ major.”

In reality, fewer than one in 10 college graduates major in the broader social sciences umbrella as a whole, according to the Education Data Initiative. As of 2014-2015, fewer than 1,500 people per year—out of nearly 2 million bachelor’s degrees awarded—were graduating with degrees in women’s studies, the Washington Post reported in 2017. While the dig at gender studies is nothing new, it tracks with the ongoing moral panic about “critical race theory” and so-called “woke gender ideology” fueled by leading conservative politicians and media figures. 

Biden said Wednesday that nearly 90 percent of people eligible for relief make under $75,000 per year. Nearly half of all Latino borrowers will have their entire student debt wiped out, NBC News reported Wednesday. 

In addition to forgiving up to $20k in student loans, Biden paused student loan payments for another four months through the end of the year, and is poised to overhaul the income-driven repayment plan for low and middle-income borrowers. 

As Biden departed after making his remarks Wednesday, a reporter shouted a question asking if the plan was unfair to people who already paid back their loans or decided not to take any out. 

“Is it fair to people who do not own multi-billion-dollar businesses if they see one of these guys getting all the tax breaks?” Biden responded. “Is that fair? What do you think?”

Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here.