Kris Kobach claims victory in federal student loan case that Kansas was kicked out of | Opinion
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is congratulating himself for winning a preliminary injunction blocking the U.S. Department of Education from providing debt relief to millions of student-loan borrowers nationwide, including thousands of Kansans.
“Blue collar Kansas workers who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees,” Kobach said in his press release.
My first thought upon reading that was that maybe if Kobach had taken a gender studies course or two, he might be a little less homophobic than he is, and he might better understand why Kansas women turned out in droves two years ago to vote against banning abortions.
But last month, Kobach filed suit to allow schools to continue discrimination against LGBTQ students. And this month, he and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey vowed to continue a Texas lawsuit seeking to ban abortion pills, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the doctors who brought the case had no legal standing to.
But setting that aside, what Kobach didn’t bother to mention in his press release on student loans is that Kansas was kicked out of this court case, which he started and which his office has pursued, because he couldn’t show in any credible way how Kansas would be harmed by student loan forgiveness.
Two weeks before the injunction was issued, U.S. District Judge Daniel D. Crabtree ruled that only three of the 11 states that joined Kobach’s crusade against student loan relief — Texas, Alaska and South Carolina — actually had standing to sue.
They could stay because they have state-sponsored programs that service student loans that could lose money if the debt gets reduced.
Kansas doesn’t have such a program. Neither does Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska or Utah, which also joined the suit.
The court rejected Kobach’s two arguments for keeping Kansas in the case.
Kobach maintained cutting student debt would reduce state taxes and free state employees from what basically amounts to indentured servitude.
On taxes: “Accelerating any debt cancellation from the years 2026-on into the 2024-25 period will cost the States tax revenues,” Kobach argued.
My response to that would be: Boo hoo Kris. You’re always telling us how anti-tax you are. Deal with it. (This is probably why I’m not a judge.)
The actual judge ruled Kansas created its own problem, because of the way it links state taxes to federal adjusted income. “This is an incidental effect … traceable to plaintiffs’ own decisions about how to tax revenue,” Crabtree wrote.
Kobach also argued that Kansas would lose employees if student debt is relieved, because of a program offering to pay off student loans for public employees. Essentially, he said Kansas can strong-arm its workers if they’re saddled with debts.
“As a matter of rudimentary economics, borrowers with an original principal balance of $12,000 or less will lose a significant incentive to stay in lower paying public service jobs if they can have that debt forgiven in the same amount of time wherever they go,” he wrote.
My response: Pay your people what they’re worth and you wouldn’t have this problem.
The judge’s response: “No court has ever bought into this theory, and this court declines to become the first.”
Crabtree concluded: “These plaintiffs simply have no skin in the game,” citing a test from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “Their answer to Justice Scalia’s colloquial expression of standing — What’s it to you? — is this: It’s nothing.”
So where we are is that essentially Kobach has spent a wad of Kansas taxpayers’ dollars on a lawsuit that doesn’t affect us and we’re not even a party to anymore.
Texas, Alaska and South Carolina can thank us for that generosity.
The court record indicates that Kansas paid at least four lawyers to carry the case: Kobach, Deputy Attorney General Abhishek S. Kambli, Assistant Attorney General Erin B. Gaide and private counsel Drew C. Ensign of Phoenix.
What’s that cost? Who knows? I left a message with Kobach’s office to ask.
I’m not exactly holding my breath waiting for them to call back.
