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,” Debt Collective’s Larson told me, referring to the Senate’s Republican leader. “We all know that the Senate in particular is as corrupt and racist and useless for anybody but the rich as any governing body on earth. The left should be looking for solutions that can help us win real gains without having to go through Congress.”

In 2015, the Debt Collective launched the first U.S. student-debt strike in history, collaborating with former student debtors who had attended predatory for-profit colleges. The 2015 debt strikers deployed a legal strategy enabling thousands of people to apply for and receive debt relief from the Department of Education, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars and counting. Approximately 25 million people are already not paying their student debts; the collective urges that people “politicize” this nonpayment and reject a logic that sees noncompliance with the debt system as moral and personal failure.

Yet this debt resistance movement has always been as committed to navigating the strictures of the given political, economic, and legal system as it has been to rhetorically rejecting its claims to legitimacy. The new strike campaign, initiated on Friday with a launch event at the University of California, Los Angeles, aims to support individuals in debt nonpayment, but again recognizes that a strike is only one tactic in the push for jubilee. “That is what it means to organize within already existing conditions,” Larson noted.

There are undeniably huge risks in staking a movement’s success on the election of the right president and putting full faith in any politician to deliver economic justice. That’s why the work of spreading the collective debt strike is as — if not more — crucial than delivering elegant and efficient solutions to elected and would-be elected officials.

In their two-pronged approach of economic disobedience combined with realpolitik know-how, the movement for debt resistance promotes a politics of critical realism, working within and against a rotten system. As a statement from Debt Collective this week put it, “if we leave this up to politicians, it is never going to happen. We need a mass movement to ensure student debt cancellation.” But the statement also emphasized that “we need to elect a president who will push the button.”