Even as he denounced the Supreme Court ruling placing down his pupil debt forgiveness program and blamed Republicans for going after it, President Biden mentioned Friday that his administration would begin a brand new effort to cancel school loans underneath a unique regulation.

The regulation Mr. Biden cited, the Higher Education Act of 1965, incorporates a provision — Section 1082 of Title 20 of the United States Code — that provides the secretary of schooling the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption.”

Some proponents of pupil debt reduction had proposed that the Biden administration invoke this regulation as the premise of the president’s authentic mortgage cancellation program. In February 2021, for instance, a bunch of Democrats together with Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chuck Schumer of New York, the bulk chief, introduced a resolution urging that step.

But because the Covid-19 pandemic swelled, the Biden administration as an alternative used a law giving the secretary of schooling energy to “waive or modify” federal pupil mortgage provisions in a nationwide emergency. (A regulation handed by Congress to deal with the pandemic, the HEROES Act, might have made that route extra engaging to policymakers, as a result of it additionally exempted some company actions from the standard rule-making and notice-and-comment processes.)

On Friday, in a lawsuit introduced by Republican-controlled states, the six Republican-appointed justices dominated that the administration had stretched that regulation too far.

Should Mr. Biden’s new plan face the same lawsuit, as appears probably as a matter of political actuality, it will finally come earlier than the identical Supreme Court — elevating the query of whether or not the wording variations between the statutes will make any distinction.

In the bulk ruling, Chief Justice Roberts mentioned the phrases “waive or modify” couldn’t be legitimately interpreted as conferring the facility to cancel debt at an enormous scale, and he invoked a conservative doctrine that courts ought to strike down company actions that elevate “major questions” if Congress didn’t clearly and unambiguously grant such authority.

While Mr. Biden mentioned he thought the Supreme Court on Friday had gotten the regulation mistaken, he maintained that the brand new strategy was “legally sound” and mentioned that he had directed his staff to maneuver as shortly as doable. Miguel Cardona, the schooling secretary, had taken step one to begin the method, the president mentioned.

Mr. Biden predicted that utilizing the Higher Education Act would take longer than his authentic plan, however mentioned, “In my view, it’s the best path that remains to providing as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.”

Ms. Warren in early 2021 additionally launched a seven-page paper from September 2020 by Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center, which she had commissioned, laying out an argument in better element for the way the Higher Education Act might be used to cancel pupil debt.