[Marxism] Docking SS checks for unapid student loans

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Chronicle of Higher
Education  http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005120801n.htm

Today's News

Thursday, December 8, 2005

Supreme Court Allows Government to Dock Social Security Checks to Repay Old
Student Loans

By STEPHEN BURD

Washington

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the federal
government can deduct money from Social Security checks to cover
long-overdue student-loan debts.

In an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court rejected
arguments by lawyers for James Lockhart, a 67-year-old disabled man who
said he depends on his monthly $874 Social Security check to pay for food
and medical expenses.

For the past three years, the Treasury Department has been withholding at
least $93 a month from his payments to try to recover a portion of the
$85,000 that Mr. Lockhart owes for student loans he took out from the
mid-to-late 1980s.

The court's decision, issued barely a month after the justices heard oral
arguments in the case (The Chronicle, November 3), was a victory for the
Bush administration. The White House has made recovering the $7-billion in
student loans that are in default a key budgetary priority, and
administration officials strongly opposed Mr. Lockhart's lawsuit, saying
that the government's debt-collection tools should not be weakened.

Consumer advocates, who were disappointed by the outcome, said that the
government's aggressive efforts to collect on loans were hurting many poor
people who lack the money to pay back their loans.

The case, James Lockhart v. United States (No. 04-881), involved a
confusing tangle of laws defining the federal government's debt-collection
powers and differing notions of the will of Congress at the time the
various measures were passed.

At issue was whether revisions in the Higher Education Act that removed
statute-of-limitations barriers to student-loan collection should be
applied to Social Security checks. Mr. Lockhart's lawyers had argued that,
for Social Security recipients, Congress intended to keep the time limits
in place.

In 1991 Congress amended the Higher Education Act to exempt government
collection efforts from federal or state statutes of limitations. At the
time, however, federal law forbade the government to reduce Social Security
benefits to offset unpaid debts to the government.

Five years later Congress eliminated the restriction on docking Social
Security benefits when it revised the Debt Collection Act, the law that
allows the government to recover debt. However, it kept intact a provision
preventing the government from reducing those benefits and others for debts
that were more than a decade old.

In 2001 the federal government began deducting money from Social Security
payments to collect on overdue student-loan debts, regardless of their age.
Among those affected were Mr. Lockhart, who said in his lawsuit that the
government was causing him undue financial hardship.

Mr. Lockhart was represented by lawyers from Public Citizen, the advocacy
group founded by Ralph Nader. They argued that Congress, when it amended
the Higher Education Act in 1991, did not intend its decision nullifying
statutes of limitations to apply to Social Security payments because
lawmakers didn't allow Social Security payments to be docked at all until
five years later.

But the government argued that Congress had made its intentions clear when,
in drafting the 1991 amendment to the Higher Education Act, it stated that
the measure would eliminate all statutes of limitations in the collection
of student-loan debt "notwithstanding any other provision of statute,
regulation, or administrative limitation."

The Supreme Court sided with the government, stating that Congress had
expressly forbidden setting any time limit on the collection of
student-loan debt.

In the court's decision, just four-and-a-half pages long, Justice O'Connor,
who is retiring from the court, cited a 1991 Supreme Court decision that
stated: "The fact that Congress may not have foreseen all of the
consequences of a statutory enactment is not a sufficient reason for
refusing to give effect to its plain meaning."

Justice Antonin Scalia filed a concurring opinion.

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