Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

On Friday, the group Debt Collective began its second mass student loan debt strike. The leftist organizers’ put student debt jubilee on the map during Occupy Wall Street and their legacy shines throughout progressive politics. Even serious presidential hopefuls like Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have taken up the mantle of erasing student debt.

“Congress built a self-destruct button into the heart of the student debt system. This means we could win a debt jubilee months from now!”

The organizers with Debt Collective offer more than just grassroots support for debt forgiveness: The group has come up with an actionable legal blueprint for making it happen — and fast. “The next president can cancel all student debt on day one,” said a statement from the Debt Collective. “Congress built a self-destruct button into the heart of the student debt system. This means we could win a debt jubilee months from now!” Debt Collective’s approach to erasing student debt is based on using a Department of Education legal authority, under the 1965 Higher Education Act, to “compromise, waive or release” any claims it has against student debtors. A willing president could, without new legislation, immediately enact the cancellation of at least all public student debt. While supposed pragmatists deem such plans as impractical and idealistic, progressive candidates are taking notice: This year, Warren became the first presidential hopeful to vow to use this exact executive authority to wipe away the majority of U.S. student debt.

We are closer than ever to making student debt erasure happen not because of policy wonks at think tanks or Senate offices, but rather because a grassroots movement organized behind an aim and then set about figuring out how to make it a reality. “It is critical for people to understand that the grassroots does not just take ideas from on high and build support for them,” Ann Larson, a Debt Collective member currently on student debt strike told me by email. “Law and policy are just not that complicated, though elites like us to think that they are and that we should leave the real thinking up to the professionals. We refuse to do so.”

Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP

As for which presidential candidates might be up to the task, there seem to be two strong contenders: Warren and Sanders. While Warren has already pledged to use the authority, her debt forgiveness proposal is less robust than Sanders’s. In January, Sanders introduced a bill that would automatically cancel student loans that were made, insured, or guaranteed by the federal government. The different approaches are unsurprising; Warren has long supported a mode of governance through executive powers. It’s nonetheless striking that a Democratic presidential candidate famed for detailed policy planning is proposing to use the little-known legal provision that the Debt Collective’s legal research helped bring to light. And the organizers are keen for Sanders to embrace a possible executive action plan, in recognition that a Republican majority in Congress will stymie progressive student debt legislation.

“A bold executive could instruct the secretary of education to immediately free 45 million people from the burden of student debt without having to ask Mitch McConnell’s permission.”