Maryland Congressman John Delaney made a bold move in declaring his presidential candidacy just months after President Trump took office. This is not a gimmick. Given what I have seen from Delaney on the student loan issue, it is clear that this man has political courage unlike anyone in Congress. What’s more, he is onto something.

Unlike every other type of loan in this country, student loans have been uniquely singled out, and special qualifiers have been erected that make bankruptcy discharge essentially impossible.  The lobbying strength of the banks even made discharge unavailable for private student loans in 2005.  This has created a predatory, hyper-inflationary lending system that has grown to obscene proportions, and is crushing millions of people and their families under its weight.  

Since 1998, when this bankruptcy exception was made permanent by Congress, student loan debt has exploded from $150 billion to $1.5 trillion, and Congress has done absolutely nothing to stop this trend. Student loan borrowers have been left to fend for themselves, prey to the banks and even the Department of Education- which today profits more than $50 billion per year on the lending system, and even makes a profit on defaulted student loans, astoundingly.

The founders saw this coming. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and many others were abused badly by British banks and merchants, and they made it a point to require bankruptcy rights ahead of the power to raise an army, and even the power to declare war in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Not the Bill of Rights- the Constitution itself!

For those of us fighting in the trenches for student loan justice, the past decade has been one of walking in the wilderness.  We had high hopes that Congress with President Obama would pass legislation that would, at a minimum, return bankruptcy protections to student loans. Not only did this not happen, nearly $1 trillion was added to the nation’s student debt tab over the past 8 years. Disturbingly, the current cast of high profile democrats have continued to fake it on this issue.

Elizabeth Warren, for example, taught bankruptcy at Harvard, and completely nailed a seminal interview on 60 Minutes about the absence of bankruptcy protections from student loans in 2006. Since her election to the Senate, however, she has done absolutely nothing toward that end.

Bernie Sanders, similarly, was quick to loudly and proudly come out for bankruptcy rights for Puerto Rico. Yet, he never even mentioned “bankruptcy” and “student loans” in the same sentence during his entire presidential campaign.  

Hillary Clinton fought for students with her Student Borrower Bill of Rights Act in 2006, which would have returned bankruptcy, put repayment caps on loans, but she, too, essentially abandoned the 44 million citizens saddled under this predatory debt in her most recent campaign.

Things were looking very grim for student loan borrowers until 2015, when Delaney introduced—without fanfare—a bill that would return standard bankruptcy protections to student loans. He has reintroduced the bill this session with a republican as prime co-sponsor. This legislation has given a lot of people hope again that the political process might actually work to restore the constitutional rights of the citizens. Suffice it to say, Delaney stands heads and shoulders above everyone else in Congress on the student loan issue.  

I seriously doubt Delaney is aware of the truly large numbers of voters he could mobilize with this. My best estimate is that something like 27 million of the 44 million borrowers in the country are unable to make payments on their loans, or at least aren’t making a dent in them. While none of these voters want to file for bankruptcy, and few likely will when bankruptcy protections are restored, all student loan holders feel, viscerally, the weight of this debt on their backs, and will respond strongly to a leader who fought for them when the cameras weren’t on.  It is this kind of authenticity that the voters have been yearning for.

My research indicates strongly that the lending system has crossed the threshold of stability, and the entire lending system could lose legitimacy in the eyes of the country well before 2020. In 2014, the number of defaulted borrowers jumped by 400,000. Last year this number skyrocketed by 1.1 million borrowers to a reported total of about 8 million people.  But this total is wrong—the Department of Education has said that about 20 percent of defaulters rehabilitate their loans (a hugely harmful process where the borrowers sign for a new, much larger loan, and default again about 80 percent of the time). So the true number of defaulters at the end of the year was likely closer to 9.6 million, and by the end of this year we will likely be close to 11 million people, or a quarter of all borrowers.  

Whatever the future holds, Mr. Delaney would do very well to fight hard for his bill between now and the election.  In the eyes of the 44 million voters who are under threat (and the tens of millions who soon will be), such efforts will greatly distinguish him from the pretenders in the field, regardless of how much popularity they may currently enjoy.

Alan Collinge is Founder of StudentLoanJustice.Org, and author of “The Student Loan Scam” (Beacon Press).