Kamala Harris touts student loan forgiveness in teachers union speech

Vice President Kamala Harris touted the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness efforts in a speech to a teachers union in Houston.

“We see a future where every student has the support and the resources they need to thrive, and a future where no teacher has to struggle with the burden of student loan debt,” Harris said to roughly 3,000 teachers gathered in a convention hall. “So, as an example, our administration has forgiven student loan debt for nearly 5 million Americans.”

President Joe Biden has tried multiple times to forgive student loans without getting approval from Congress. His first plan amounted to at least $400 billion, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court as illegal. He has made a litany of smaller rounds of cancellation since, some of which have also been reined in by the courts.

The American Federation of Teachers, led by its controversial president, Randi Weingarten, is the nation’s second-largest teachers union and one of many labor organizations that consistently backs Democrats in local and national elections.

Harris spoke at AFT’s national convention, in which she was introduced by Weingarten and a Pittsburgh teacher, Brittany Shoup, who said Biden had forgiven her student loans.

“I told her earlier that her entry into this race has electrified this race,” Weingarten said, “and has electrified this hall.”

Shoup said the administration made the process of applying for cancellation programs easy, “so I applied and later had my student loans forgiven.”

Weingarten told the gathering of teachers that they had an “assignment” to shatter voter turnout records and elect Harris president.

AFT voted unanimously to endorse Harris on Monday, becoming the first major union to do so after Biden abruptly left the race on Sunday.

When Harris took the stage, the electrified crowd chanted “Kamala! Harris!” in a call-and-response fashion, causing her briefly to delay beginning her remarks.

Onstage, Harris told the story of another teacher who had loans written off by the Biden White House. That teacher, she said, had paid on her loans for 20 years and wondered if she’d have to leave teaching to pay her bills. She still owed $40,000 after two decades, “and we forgave it all.”

“When she learned that her loans had been forgiven, she said, ‘Well, me and my children knew our lives had changed, and we were just dancing, dancing,’” Harris said.

Elsewhere in her remarks, Harris hit many of the administration’s other major policy points, saying she opposes “book bans,” supports transgender rights, wants to protect access to abortion, and backs gun control measures.

“We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books,” Harris said. “Can you imagine?”

Weingarten said at the convention’s opening session that GOP nominee Donald Trump represents an “existential threat to democracy” and warned that “it is seldom a dramatic event or attack that lets fascism in the door. The violence comes later, after they are voted in.”

The union also proposed a host of progressive political resolutions at its convention, such as those opposing charter schools and “ultra-right MAGA” Republicans.

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Harris thanked the union for becoming the first to endorse her and said its members could help her become president next year.

“This work is personal, and it is professional, and it is so critically important, and so it is because of [my first-grade teacher] Mrs. Wilson, and so many teachers like her, that I stand before you as vice president of the United States of America,” she said. “And that I am running to become president of the United States.”