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Hello again everyone, and thanks very much for joining us.

Almost 45 million Americans, by one estimate, are carrying higher education debt loans that in sum require 13 digits to measure.

The total now approaches $2 trillion nationwide, $13 billion of that debt, according to the state Student Loan Agency, is owned by perhaps 400,000 Arkansans or owed.

I should say, with the average IOU about 33,000 bucks, the Biden administration has proposed debt forgiveness of 10,000, perhaps as much as $20,000 per person.

As of this week, the administration's executive order is under legal challenge by 6 states, including Arkansas.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge joins us now.

General, thanks very much for coming in.

Well, thank you, Steve.

On the basis of what is your litigation phase, the state joining?

Well, essentially, the reason why we have taken action against President Biden's administration over the student loan cancellation is because it's a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

It's beyond his authority as president.

Not to mention, it's patently unfair.

To put the student loan debt taken out by adult college age individuals on the backs of hardworking Americans, we're looking at upwards of $400 billion that Americans are going to have to pay back that never took out these loans.

And so we are challenging the President.

He's leaning on what's called the Heroes Act, and that Heroes Act was put in place during the Iraq War to give.

Aid to our military men and women, or to give aid during a national, or rather during a national emergency.

Perhaps President Biden forgot Steve that he declared the pandemic was over a few weeks or a month or so ago when he leaned on the Heroes Act.

The Heroes Act was designed to help our brave men and women, or during a national emergency.

It's doing neither, it simply helping those who have taken out high dollar.

Loans in order to get those high dollar degrees, well some of those high dollar degrees are not that high dollar.

I mean they're, they're owed by the very people who you say are going to have to shoulder the debt.

I mean the plumbers, electricians, I think you mentioned meat cutters, mechanics and even doctors.

Well, that's right.

But why should.

Why should all Americans have to shoulder the debt of those who chose to take it out?

This is something that we have, you know, again, it's patently unfair, but it's against the law.

The president did not have the authority.

He's trying to put himself in the place of Congress in order to appease to his political base going into an election.

This is something we have seen time and again from President Biden since he took office in January 20th, 2021, I've had to take.

Over 100 legal actions against this president.

And unfortunately that's just a start.

This this lawsuit is about fairness and it's about the rule of law.

Neither of those things this President Biden adhere to or respect the.

Advocates of the administration procedure say that these individuals are caught in forces beyond absolutely beyond their control, economic forces beyond their control, and that the debt itself, the terms of the debt itself, were inherently unfair.

Your response?

Well, I think that's a, a weak response.

What I would advise those individuals who have student loan debt is to do exactly what I did when I had student loans.

I paid those loans off.

Is it difficult?

You bet.

But I knew as an adult when I took out a loan to get a higher education degree, whether it was my bachelor's degree or my jurist Dr to be an attorney, I knew when I took out those loans that I would be required to pay those back.

That was making a contract.

Perhaps we need to look at the cost of our colleges and universities, but first and foremost, what?

We don't need to do is have a president violating the law in order to appease to his political base.

Well, your opponents say that you are playing to your or the opponents of the of the Biden administration section are playing to their policy.

It's by and large a Republican initiative, is it not?

That the lawsuit?

The lawsuit?

I'm sorry, sure.

Yes.

So the six states involved include five Republican attorneys general, plus the governor of Iowa.

And that you know there are but that we anticipate other states, but every state should be up in arms about this if they have standing.

Arkansas does have standing.

I've worked with our Solicitor General, Nick Brawny, who argued a case earlier this week at the US Supreme Court and Nick and I worked together on it to ensure that we had standing.

And that's one of the things many states are looking at.

And we do have standing because of the Arkansas Student Loan Authority.

We have a independent agency that works with the receives the federal funds.

For these student loans and this will perhaps undercut the revenue that these Arkansas Student Loan Authority has when you declare that that the President has declared the pandemic over.

That seems to have been rooted, correct me if I'm wrong, in a in a remark that he made during a recent, I think, television interview or newspaper interview.

That's something short of a formal declaration of the end of the pandemic, though.

Is it known?

Is that is that a fairly thin Reed to hang your lawsuit on?

Well, I think anytime the president speaks.

He needs to understand that he is speaking as the President United States.

He no longer has the luxury of mumbling out things that may or may not be true.

This is not a time to pontificate when you're the President of United States, but rather you are speaking as the the commander-in-chief.

You're speaking as the leader of the free world.

Unfortunately, Steve, we've seen time and again where this President speaks and oftentimes his administration has to roll back what he says.

And when the president says that the pandemic is over, and yet he leans on something, such as the Heroes Act, which again was designed for our brave men and women in the military.

In order to give those who have received these high dollar degrees, who have taken out student loans and now are not able to pay them back, we need to make sure that we're addressing inflation, that we're addressing immigration rather than focused on issues, quite frankly, that are going to linger.

We need to focus on things that are impacting.

Everyday arcane sense and everyday Americans this president is not focused on it.

Let me ask a question on an unrelated subject and that's the US District Judge in the past several days struck down a portion of Arkansas law involving ballot access and the the immediate beneficiary was the Libertarian Party as the state.

Have you reviewed that decision by Judge Baker and decided what you're going to do about.

I mean isn't appeal the team at the Attorney General's office we're looking into it.

We've been reviewing it since Judge Baker's decision last Friday.

And so we have not yet made a decision or announced a decision as to how we're going to handle that.

General, thank you very much for being with us.

Thank you for coming in.

You bet.

Come back soon.

We'll be right back with an opposing view.

Back now and as mentioned, there is another perspective to the student debt issue.

A former teacher, state Senator Joyce Elliott of Little Rock joins us now.

Senator, thank you very much for coming in for making yourself available.

Thanks for having me, Steve.

Absolutely the there are primarily or two primary arguments anyway on the student issue from the other side, from the adversarial side, one is that the president has exceeded his statutory constitutional authority and let's start there, your response to that.

Well, I trust that the President has a folks around him that can give him good at legal advice or whether or not he has the authority to put this policy in place.

And of course I recognize there's another side to it.

But I applaud the President for carrying out this for this policy based on the the best advice I think he has available to him, to them.

And that's something that will be sorted out down the road.

And I think this comes up anytime there is an executive order that that is issued.

And so I trust that.

That that process will just play itself out.

But in the meantime, I think he's done the right thing.

Well, that was my next question with with your understanding anyway of statutory and constitutional law, you're satisfied that he does his his advisers aside, but you're satisfied that he does have that authority.

Yes I am I I because I I think President Biden has not been he's not been one that's quick to act without having sound reason advice for what he what he does.

And so that's one of the reasons that I trust it and this was something he had talked about when he was running for office.

I'm sure it was research then and I'm sure even more so prior to his issuing this order.

So I'm comfortable with it and there's a there's a process in place for challenging it.

So that just let it play itself out in the meantime.

We could be doing something good for some folks who really need some relief.

Well, the other argument is primary argument anyway, is that what he is doing is simply unjust.

That this, that these loans were taken out willingly and with full knowledge that they had to be supposedly had to be repaid and it is unfair.

The other side argues that the taxpayers at large should be asked to shoulder that responsibility.

Your response it's it's it's.

There may be a fair point to make if we don't think about this in in totality.

For example, during COVID when folks were having such a difficult time could make payroll in the process maybe of perhaps losing businesses and so forth.

People got loans in the millions of dollars and it was not as if I felt that comfortable about it since I'm not one that's it or that category of where I could have gotten along for millions of dollars and there was an understanding at that time as well that these loans.

Would would likely be paid back.

But I think we all know that there was loan forgiveness in the millions of dollars from many people in in the country.

And while I didn't see that as a direct benefit for me, I saw myself as being a part of paying it.

I understood that as an American and as a person who was part of the United States of America.

And we have for a long time had kind of this social contract that we would help each other when we were in hard times and I don't think many people.

And argued that students folks with these loans are not in some very difficult times.

It's not the most ideal thing to do, but there comes a time in the interests of the country that we help one another because there is no doubt a person who did not go to college and did not get a loan.

You are being benefited in some way by the rest of us who are paying taxes.

And I don't have a problem with that because I think we are here for one another at times like this.

Not everybody is going to go to college, not everybody wants to, not everybody needs to.

I totally get that.

But at the same time, there are folks who are going to go to college.

We need to.

We need people with college degrees, just as we need people who choose not to go to college.

And there may come a time when we have to do something for each other because we have, especially the millennials, are so bogged down in debt, they cannot even get a start in our state, in our country.

They can't get a start.

And they're the same thing is true of many people who are in their 60s.

They are paying off college debt, I submit by getting these people, getting all the folks that are getting these loans.

They're in a position where they can have jobs and do all the things they need to do that they thought they would be before they reach this point of having loans that are so pressing on them.

All they can do is pay back the loans.

And at this point too, I, I, I don't doubt we need to do some, some more work on this.

We need to look at the policies that we have in place and what we can do to help people go to college or if they choose workforce and some other way, we need to take a look at that.

The causes of policies that we don't have in place, that help people after high school, that has those policies are are the things that have people trapped right now.

If one is struck by a couple of things about this argument and one is that the bipartisan nature of the criticism of it, it it.

There are a great many on the Democrats or those on the political left who are every bit as critical of the President's proposals debt proposal as some on the right.

But that that is true.

But there are also, that's also true on the other side, people who think it's a good idea to relieve folks of some of this debt so that they do have an opportunity to be folks who are contributors to our economy beyond just paying debt and and paying off interest.

For many of them that is the major thing they're doing and they're not actively contributing to the rest of the economy and the way that they should not building the kind of life that they should be able to.

Build.

And so it is.

It is not surprising because I don't think this is a partisan thought.

It's not surprising that there are.

There are folks on both sides that are part of both parties.

But the president is the one who who has to maybe quote, UN quote, break that tie and decide what is best for the country and recognize people have a right to disagree.

I don't dismiss people's thoughts about this.

I just think on the whole, which is I always, which is what I always try to.

2.

On balance, it makes more sense to help people get a start in life because after all, we do suggest to folks in our country, students, you go to college or you go or you go maybe to a technical school, you do something to get some training to be in the workforce.

And a part of that training in the workforce does happen to be higher Ed.

This is, I mean, people who go to college are part of the workforce like everybody else.

And I I, I wish we would think about this in terms of there are some highways, you know?

They don't drive on, but as you repay the taxes to make sure those highways are there, there are some things we do for the common good.

Maybe I'll never call an ambulance, but I surely don't have any problem with paying so that we have it, and there are any number of things like that.

Maybe I don't go to the library every other day, but I sure want it to be there.

So I I wish we would look at it this way because this it's easy to demagogue, I get that.

But if we step back from it, I think we're to think about what's in the best interest of the country about about a minute remaining senator and one other argument.

And that is by the very nature of post secondary education, those who receive it.

Or who pursue it are quite more likely to earn to move into an income bracket where they are capable of repaying a loan so that this is, in other words, a middle class entitlement, even a gift to the upper income.

Your response?

Well, I I hope people will remember that there is a cap on how much of the loan will be forgiven.

You know if if you make $125,000 or so, not more than that, you may get a loan of forgiveness for $20,000.

And if you are at $250,000, I think it's only $10,000 or if you have gone, if you've gotten a Pell Grant is $20,000.

So it's not as if there are going to be some people who are going to have a loan.

And this is all said and done just because it's capped at a certain amount.

Have to end it there, senator, because we're certainly we're out of time and we thank you very much for yours.

Come back soon.

Thank you.

In a moment, the ballot box, we'll be right back.

We are back now, litigation of a different sort, this time with the state as defendant.

A federal judge has made final her preliminary ruling that Arkansas law unconstitutionally infringed on the ballot access of third parties and their candidates.

The decision was a victory for the Libertarian Party of Arkansas and its chair.

Joins us now Doctor Michael Paco, thanks very much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

This was not in your telling much of a surprise.

Judge Baker, Judge Karen Baker's ruling.

Well, this has been going on for some time.

We brought this suit originally in early 2019 and she issued a preliminary injunction that allowed us to get on the ballot with 10,000 signatures for both the 2020 and now the 2022 elections.

It had been litigated to the appeals court.

The state appealed the preliminary.

Junction and that felt was found in our favor.

So it's really no surprise that when the final ruling came out that was in the same direction that she ruled in favor of the Libertarian Party position on just about every issue that we we brought up before the court.

Well there there is of course always the possibility that the state could appeal this ruling that is a possibility.

Certainly I I think given the record in this case on how really seriously we ended up on on the top in this case that it would be kind of.

You know, very long odds that the appeals court would change their mind and overrule this.

And in the meanwhile the legal fees keep piling up for both the state and and our our expenses as well, which are then covered because we have won a civil rights lawsuit in terms of the state being able to set.

Standards for its own elections, its own ballot access, the part of the Libertarian Party among other spiritual defendants.

Anyway, our plaintiffs anyway, contended that it was artificially high, and the judge eventually agreed to you.

But why too high?

Why is it so unreasonable?

Well, one of the things that the court looks at is whether a party has ever successfully met the challenges, but before the the courts or before the the the parties, and in this case, until the signature requirement was changed.

Than 3% of the vote to 10,000 votes in 2007.

No political party had ever made that standard and so having lowered it to 10,000 than the Greens were able to make the ballot four times.

The Libertarians now six times.

That's a showing that that at least it's a hurdle that's surmountable and and comparing to other states.

So that's also a factor as well.

You know other states have not as restrictive limits and it's not just the number of signatures.

We were contesting here.

It was also the the early deadlines for for turning in those signatures, the deadlines for our candidates to have to register with the state and for that matter even the the restriction that we petition within a 90 day window.

So all those aspects of the election law pertaining to new political parties were struck down as unconstitutional in this ruling.

But was it so, was it onerously high?

Again, the judge obviously agreed with you that it was.

Well, yeah, I mean and especially when you combine those.

Actors, the early deadline when the voters aren't necessarily focused on elections, the 90 day window which was never explained what what the purpose of that was, and then the very high signature count which becomes an expensive proposition for a third party with limited resources.

So we are really facing a situation where we would not have been able to make make it on the ballot if if we were held to that higher.

Standard.

Well, in that event, then, would that not demonstrate that the Libertarian Party simply lacks the base in Arkansas?

Thus far, well you know, to be to be a significant player.

Well that's that's the question there.

There's there's certainly an understanding that the state has legitimate interest in controlling access to the elections.

The question is whether that is narrowly drawn whether it whether those restrictions are necessary for the efficient functioning of the electoral process.

And you know that the state argued that, well, we don't want ballot overcrowding for instance, but that's certainly not the case, the over 40% of the state.

Legislature is already elected, there will not face any opponent in the November election, and another 20% is only contested by Libertarian candidates.

So there certainly is no ballot overcrowding.

Another argument was that the state has grown since they established the 10,000 limit.

Well, only by 6%.

So, you know, all these arguments just didn't make sense in terms of why the state needed to make the the ballot access standards more restrictive than they were.

This would certainly be if sustained.

It would certainly appear to open the the mechanical or the procedural door anyway for the Libertarian Party in in Arkansas.

Well, yeah, what what this would mean was it would be in the future if we need to petition again, those burdensome requirements won't be in our way.

But what it does leave us with is kind of a system that really is ill defined because pretty much all the requirements for how to become a new political party in Arkansas have been struck down and if if it's us or the green.

Party.

Or, you know, some other political party that wants to get on the ballot in 2024.

The way is not clear there.

There's no no governing statutes anymore, so it really is a matter that needs to be addressed.

Does it open an ideological door?

Does it make it more practical for for not only the Libertarian Party but for say the Greens are any other?

Well to the extent that it leaves the door open for some parties to be able to make the ballot it doesn't give you any traction that you already did have.

Well you know I I think when people read about or hear about this case it's it's been 100% of the people who comment to me are are comments saying that.

You know that just wasn't right the way the legislature forced you to go to court to stay on the ballot and and so I think we get a little bit of sympathy for being pushed around by the legislature a little bit but other than that you know it's it's up to our candidates.

So we're out on the campaign trail right now to express our political point of view and to bring in the votes for Libertarian candidates that you know our our job as a political party is to make sure that our candidates have a platform to go to the voters with exceptionally rare exceptions not only in Arkansas.

Certainly in Arkansas, but not just in Arkansas, third party candidates in American politics have not had a great deal of luck since the founding of the Republic.

That's true.

That's true once.

Once we get an entrenched two party system where it's pretty much US versus them, it's hard for a third party to get a wedge in there then the way our electoral system works now and you know some States and some jurisdictions are starting to experiment with different voting systems with approval voting.

For ranked choice voting and I, I think if if we tried a system like that we'd probably have a better outcome for third parties because you wouldn't be so worried about well if I vote for a guy A, then guy B is going to win.

But you could really express your will at the voting booth.

Could we anticipate, should we anticipate that the Libertarian Party for one would begin an active campaign in in behalf of rank choice or changing the structure of of elections in Arkansas.

You know that's that's always an issue that we we support.

If there was a say a a movement to gather petition signatures to put such a system in place I think you'd probably libertarians would be helpful in that regard.

But it it's not a part of our priorities but maybe it should be you'd find some pretty stiff opposition right now I think the current climate we find stiff opposition just to letting us on the belt in the 1st place.

So Doctor Michael Paco chair.

The liberation liberal.

Libertarian Party of Arkansas, thanks so much for coming in.

Thank you for having me and come back soon.

And that does it for us for this week.

Thanks so much for being with us, as always.

See you next week.

Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, The Arkansas Times and KUARFM 89.