Supreme Court: You Owe Your Soul To The Student Debt Store

Supreme Court: You Owe Your Soul To The Student Debt Store

Post By Politics alexander taylor, dissent, education department, elena kagan, EPA, heroes act, idr account adjustment, income driven repayment, Joe Biden, john roberts, kagan dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson, missouri, missouri higher education loan authority, mohela, myra brown, Nebraska, pandemic, secretary of education, sonia sotomayor, standing, state of emergency, student debt, student loan defaults, student loan forgiveness, supreme court, supreme court cancels student debt relief, waivers and modifications

The US Supreme Court today tossed out President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan (Washington Post gift link), ruling in a 6-3 decision that Biden lacked the authority to order the debt forgiveness plan without an explicit bill from Congress.

As you’ll recall, Biden announced last August a plan for the Education Department to forgive up to $10,000 for millions of borrowers in federal student loan programs, or up to $20,000 for folks who’d received Pell grants while in college. As many as 40 million Americans would have benefited from the plan. The loan forgiveness program was limited to people with incomes under $125,000 a year for an individual or $250K for a married couple, although relatively few borrowers met that upper limit anyway. The administration estimated that 90 percent of the loan forgiveness would go to borrowers making less than $75,000 a year.

Previously!

Supreme Court ‘Skeptical’ Of Student Debt Relief, If You Can Believe That!

What Good Arguments Will Supreme Court Ignore In Student Debt Relief Case?

Look At These Twerps Who Ruined Student Loan Forgiveness For Everybody

Joe Biden CANCEL CULTURES Student Debt! So How Do You Get You Some Of That?

Here’s Joe Biden To Tell You How He’ll Cancel Assloads Of Student Debt!

Almost as soon as Biden stepped away from the podium and the TV cameras switched off, rightwing groups started filing lawsuits to overturn the debt relief plan. Quite a few fizzled out as federal courts decided the plaintiffs lacked standing, because even if plaintiffs resented someone else having some of their debt forgiven, that’s hardly proof that they were harmed themselves. The Court actually decided two cases on the debt forgiveness program today, throwing out one for lack of standing but deciding in the other that Biden didn’t have the authority to forgive loans under the 2003 HEROES Act, which enables the Education Department to waive student debt obligations during times of national emergency.

Standing: You’re Grounded!

One set of plaintiffs in the case, Alexander Taylor and Myra Brown, claimed that they had been harmed because their loans didn’t qualify for debt relief — in Taylor’s case, because he didn’t qualify for the upper limit of the debt forgiveness and in Brown’s because her loans were privately held. They argued the Education Department didn’t follow proper procedures in setting up the debt forgiveness program, but the Court held today that they lacked standing, so tough nuggets, kids, and welcome to the dubious fame of being a judicial footnote.

Surprisingly, though, the Supremes agreed that the other plaintiffs, a group of six states led by Nebraska, did have standing, however sloppy the argument was. One or the six, Missouri, argued that its nonprofit state agency that services student loans nationwide, the “Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority,” aka MOHELA, would surely lose revenue because of the debt forgiveness. It’s a weird argument, because as was pointed out in oral arguments, MOHELA is a legally separate entity from the state of Missouri, and MOHELA did not join the lawsuit.

In his decision in Biden et al. v. Nebraska et al., Chief Justice John Roberts et all Missouri’s arguments, including the claim that MOHELA would lose out on $44 million a year in fees on the cancelled debt. Mind you, that’s a bit of a fiction too, since it assumes all those borrowers will pay their outstanding loans, when many will just say the hell with it and default. Roberts brushed right past the claim that MOHELA is a separate entity, citing a couple precedents that we aren’t going to chase down, and insisting that

where a State has been harmed in carrying out its responsibilities, the fact that it chose to exercise its authority through a public corporation it created and controls does not bar the State from suing to remedy that harm itself.

You don’t often see a Supreme Court decision argue that an issue of standing is literally close enough enough for government work, but at least Roberts didn’t cite any 17th century witchfinders, so let’s get on to the merits of the case.

We shouldn’t be too surprised since the Court keeps taking cases simply for the sake of throwing its weight around, as we saw last year when the Court struck down an EPA regulation that never went into effect, and today, when they protected a hypothetical Christian website designer from being sued by hypothetical gay people. (We have a separate post on that one right here.)

We Don’t Need Another HEROES Act. Or Maybe We Do.

The administration argued that it had the authority to waive student debt during the pandemic emergency, because the 2003 HEROES Act allows the Department of Education to issue “waivers and modifications” to change student debt payments during times of national emergency.

Roberts noted that sure, the law says the secretary of Education can do that, but not to the tune of an estimated $430 billion in student loan principal, because well, just because, you see. Here’s his explanation, minus the internal citations:

The text of the HEROES Act does not authorize the Secretary’s loan forgiveness program. The Secretary’s power under the Act to “modify” does not permit “basic and fundamental changes in the scheme” designed by Congress.[…] Instead, “modify” carries “a connotation of increment or limitation,” and must be read to mean “to change moderately or in minor fashion.” That is how the word is ordinarily used and defined, and the legal definition is no different.

The authority to “modify” statutes and regulations allows the Secretary to make modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, not transform them. Prior to the COVID–19 pandemic, “modifications” issued under the Act were minor and had limited effect. But the “modifications” challenged here create a novel and fundamentally different loan forgiveness program. While Congress specified in the Education
Act a few narrowly delineated situations that could qualify a borrower
for loan discharge, the Secretary has extended such discharge to nearly
every borrower in the country.

In short, Roberts says, the Education Department did some modifications and waivers under the law, but they were TOO BIG and so the entire thing exceeded the administration’s authority, so knock it off.

In a dissent that she summarized from the bench, Justice Elena Kagan said that the case never should have been taken up by the Court to start with, because the states lacked standing in the first place. The dissent (page 48 of the decision PDF), joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, points out that the HEROES Act contains none of the supposed limits Roberts invented, and that the law’s only internal limit is that the Education secretary

could do only what was “necessary” to alleviate the emergency’s impact on affected borrowers’ ability to repay their student loans. […] But within that bounded area, Congress gave discretion to the Secretary. He could “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” applying to federal student-loan programs, including provisions relating to loan repayment and forgiveness. And in so doing, he could replace the old provisions with new “terms and conditions.” […] The Secretary, that is, could give the relief that was
needed, in the form he deemed most appropriate, to counteract the effects of a national emergency on borrowers’ capacity to repay. That may have been a good idea, or it may
have been a bad idea. Either way, it was what Congress
said.

Gee, sure looks like Kagan is looking at the law’s text and original intent there, huh?

The real problem, though, Kagan wrote, is that the Court had itself overstepped its own authority by taking a case where the plaintiffs lacked standing:

Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff must have standing to challenge a government action. And that requires a personal stake—an injury in fact. We do not allow plaintiffs to bring suit just because they oppose a policy. Neither do we allow plaintiffs to rely on injuries suffered by others.

Such limits on judicial meddling are vital, but were ignored in this case, she argued:

The plaintiffs in this case are six States that have no personal stake in the Secretary’s loan forgiveness plan. They are classic ideological plaintiffs: They think the plan a very bad idea, but they are no worse off because the Secretary differs. In giving those States a forum—in adjudicating their complaint— the Court forgets its proper role. The Court acts as though it is an arbiter of political and policy disputes, rather than of cases and controversies.

Kagan went on to note that this is a pretty disturbing habit with the current court, citing last year’s case against the EPA, which was another case where Congress delegated broad regulatory authority to a government agency, only for the Court to impose arbitrary new rules to claim that Congress needed to be more specific in giving direction to the Executive branch.

Ultimately, said Kagan, the Court substituted its own ideological preferences for the will of Congress, and that is not good for America, nor good for the Court:

The Court refuses to acknowledge the plain words of the HEROES Act. It declines to respect Congress’s decision to give broad emergency powers to the Secretary. It strikes down his lawful use of that authority to provide student-loan assistance. It does not let the political system, with its mechanisms of accountability, operate as normal. It makes itself the decisionmaker on, of all things, federal student-loan policy. And then, perchance, it wonders why it has only compounded the “sharp debates” in the country?

Gosh, she’s so divisive!

Unfortunately, she’s also outnumbered, so Biden’s loan relief program is toast. But here’s where we have some good news for people struggling with student loans: Many of us can still get some relief — including, for many, complete cancellation of debt — through existing parts of the loan system that aren’t at all affected by this rotten decision. Here are the two pieces where we’ve covered this so far, and we’ll follow them up with a concise guide tomorrow, and when that’s up we’ll link it here, too)

Also Too!

I Got My Student Loans Ready For Joe Biden’s Big Income-Based Forgive-A-Thon And You Should Too

Did Joe Biden Just Fix Student Loan Debt Going Forward? Mayyyyybe!

UPDATE: Join us right here at 3:30 EDT for our WonkTV livestream of Joe Biden’s remarks on the student debt decision.

[WaPo (gift link) / Biden V. Nebraska decision]

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Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action For Everyone But Rich White People

Post By Politics affirmative action, harvard, john roberts, supreme court, supreme court affirmative action, univrsity of north carolina

The six rightwing justices on the US Supreme Court today ruled that affirmative action in college admissions violates the US Constitution, because they also want to believe the Constitution is magically “color blind,” despite its being written for and governing over a nation that has always been anything but.

The Court’s decision specifically struck down affirmative action policies at Harvard and at the University of North Carolina that had been challenged by a rightwing legal group, but the ruling will apply to virtually all public and private universities and colleges, except for the weird ones like Hillsdale that reject all federal funding so they can discriminate all they want. The vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who unlike some of her esteemed colleagues understands basic ethics rules, recused herself in the latter because she served on a board at Harvard.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that, in his fan fiction version of the United States of America, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.” He continued,

Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

As with last year’s decision nullifying Roe v. Wade, the Court’s decision today erases decades of previous Supreme Court precedents going back to the 1970s, holding that the interests of having a diverse student body allows selective institutions of higher learning to make at least some consideration of race in admissions. In essence, the Supremes now agree with Tucker Carlson, who in 2018 just wanted to know why the hell diversity is even worth bothering with.

While universities — and, as we say, previous Court decisions — believe having a diverse student body is key to education in a multiracial republic, Roberts said that Harvard and UNC’s admissions processes

lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.

Obviously, the only way to be fair is to go by students’ test scores and grades, which are completely objective and unbiased, although of course it remains perfectly fine to give special treatment to children of alumni and big donors, because that’s how you guarantee a new Economics building gets funded. That’s not discrimination, it’s just a way of filling the Endowment’s quid pro quota.

But just to show that the Civil Whites Agenda isn’t utterly heartless, Robert generously added that

nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.

That certainly reminds me of a a few white students in first-year writing classes I taught at U of Arizona in the late 1980s, whose rhetorical analysis papers on Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech said that King would be very upset on their behalf. The poor dears just knew that they were only attending a crappy state university because their guidance counselors all told them unqualified Black students had been given their places at more selective schools. They wouldn’t make that up.

In a bizarre bit of hypocrisy, the decision carved out an exception for the nation’s service academies, because apparently having a diverse officer corps in the military is valuable in ways that eradicating white supremacy in medicine, law, science, and the liberal arts is not.

In a furious 69-page dissent that she read from the bench — something justices only do when they’re well and truly pissed off at a majority’s terrible decision — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan, castigated the majority, saying that it’s a “disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required” to overturn well-established precedent. But hey, that’s what Sam Alito did in the Dobbs decision, so obviously the rightwing majority can do what it wants.

Getting right at the false premise at the heart of the majority decision — and at the center of pretty much every conservative fiction about race in America — Sotomayor wrote,

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.

She noted that ever since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Court has recognized that discrimination is real and pernicious, and that prior decisions have affirmed affirmative action as a means of ensuring equal educational opportunity for all Americans. But in today’s decision, she said,

the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter. The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.

Sotomayor has described herself as “the perfect affirmative action child,” arguing that while affirmative action helped her gain admission to elite institutions like Princeton and Yale, her achievements are absolutely her own doing. She told students at Michigan State University in 2018, “Don’t look at how I got in. Look at what I did,” and urged them to focus on what they bring to their education:

“You get in because you’re giving something of value to the community. […] And so is being different. So is coming from a background that a majority of students are not from. The question is not, how did I get in? It’s: What did I do when I got there? And with pride, I can say I graduated at the top of my class.”

The Washington Post notes (gift link) that in contrast to Sotomayor, Justice Clarence Thomas has said that

he felt affirmative action made his diploma from Yale Law practically worthless; he has been a fierce opponent of racial preferences in his three decades on the court. “Racial paternalism … can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination,” he has written.

Still as incredibly bitter as ever, Thomas read his own long concurrence with the majority opinion from the bench, claiming that the Harvard and UNC programs were “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in the entering classes,” and that they “fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our nation’s equality ideal,” at least for the perfectly spherical, frictionless, colorless human beings in the airless zero-gravity environment he imagines America to be. While he was at it, he aimed particular scorn at Jackson, accusing her of believing that “almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.”

In her own dissent (Page 209 in the opinion PDF) which she didn’t read from the bench, Justice Jackson specifically responded to Thomas’s “prolonged attack” and noted that Thomas

“does not dispute any historical or present fact about the origins and continued existence of race-based disparity (nor could he), yet is somehow persuaded that these realities have no bearing on a fair assessment of ‘individual achievement.'”

While she was at it, she wrote that Thomas “ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” and by golly she is definitely the far better writer, she wins. As to the majority’s declaration that the Constitution is colorblind, she added,

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

In conclusion, Jackson rules, Thomas drools, and things are now going to get a lot uglier before they get better, all in the name of an America that none of us actually live in, the end.

[NYT / WaPo (gift link) / US Supreme Court / Sotomayor dissent / NBC News / Detroit News / Headline stolen pretty shamelessly from Michael Harriot on Twitter / Base photo (photoshopped, cropped): Jarek Tuszynski, Creative Commons License 3.0]

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Supreme Court Decides ‘Democracy’ Can Stay, For Now

Post By Politics 1868 treaty, ak-chin indian community, alabama, arizona, brett kavanaugh, buu nygren, clarence thomas, colorado river, colorado river indian tribes, congressional district maps, dr. richard strauss, elections clause, fifth circuit court of appeals, gerrymandering, gila river indian community, governor's water policy council (arizona), independent state legislature theory, inter tribal council of arizona, ISL, jim jordan, john roberts, judicial review, katie hobbs, louisiana, marbury v. madison, maria dadgar, melissa murray, moore v harper, native americans, navajo nation, Neil Gorsuch, north carolina, ohio state university, ohio state university sex abuse, partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, samuel alito, supreme court, supreme court rulings today, us constitution, voting rights act, water rights

Fears of the End of the Republic were forestalled until sometime between the next Trump rally and November 2024, as the Supreme Court decided today that state legislatures can’t just make up any old election laws — or results — they want to, without any oversight from state or even federal courts. In Moore v. Harper, the Court decided in a six to three decision — which should have been nine to zero — that the so-called “independent state legislature theory” is dumb and bogus, not to mention seriously fucked in the head. We paraphrase, but only slightly; Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, actually said the idea was “Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.”

As many suspected following the oral arguments in December, the three dissenting justices were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, who probably belong on a terror watch list.

Previously:

Big Day At Supreme Court As It Hears Case Of ‘Democracy v. LOL’

Moore v Harper Oral Hearings: Democracy Maybe Only MOSTLY Dead!

NC Supreme Court Brings Back The Racist Gerrymandering Republicans Need To Win

The Independent State Legislature (ISL) Fan Fiction, as NYU Law Prof Melissa Murray likes to call it, starts with a thing that is real and then piles on, with no precedent or reason at all, a bunch of assumptions with virtually no actual backing in case law, US history, or common sense. The Constitution’s elections clause says simply that

The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.

According to the fabulists who made up the ISL foolishness a few decades ago, that clause means that no other state authority, including state courts, governors, or county elections officials, can challenge the legislature’s decisions on federal elections, even if they appear patently unfair.

The case involves an extreme gerrymander passed in 2021 by the heavily Republican North Carolina Legislature, which would give the vast majority of the state’s 14 congressional seats to Republicans. As the Brennan Center explains, the redistricting maps are “so extreme that an evenly divided popular vote would have awarded 10 seats to the Republicans and only four to the Democrats.”

Because North Carolina’s constitution includes a “free elections clause” that prohibits such partisan gerrymandering, the state Supreme Court struck down the map in 2022, calling it an

“egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander . . . designed to enhance Republican performance, and thereby give a greater voice to those voters than to any others.”

That prompted the North Carolina Lege to turn right around and pass a whole new extreme partisan gerrymander, and when it was challenged in state courts, Republicans went to the US Supreme Court to demand that it let the map stand, because independent state legislature, can’t you people even read?

In his decision today, Roberts wrote — actually this time — that several previous Supreme Court precedents had already made clear that state legislatures do not have “exclusive and independent authority when setting the rules governing federal elections,” and that the Elections Clause doesn’t invalidate the fundamental principal of judicial review as established in Marbury v. Madison. He also pointed out that “when legislatures make laws, they are bound by the provisions of the very documents that give them life,” i.e., state constitutions, and so obviously state courts have the power to rein in a state legislature in keeping with that state’s constitution. “You stupidheads,” Roberts did not add.

[NYT / Moore v. Harper]

While we’re at it, let’s also take a quick look at some other Supreme Court decisions we haven’t written about yet this term, just so we have ’em on record for you:

Sex Abuse Lawsuit Against Ohio State U Can Go Forward, you listening, Rep. Jordan?

On Monday, the Court decided not to hear an appeal of a lower court decision that allows more than 230 men to sue Ohio State over sexual abuse by the late Dr. Richard Strauss, who worked at Ohio State from 1978 to 1998. The university has apologized to those abused by Strauss, who killed himself in 2005, and has settled lawsuits with at least 296 victims, to the tune of over $60 million. But it tried to have the unsettled cases dismissed, claiming that the time limit to sue had expired. The AP explains:

The remaining plaintiffs have argued that they filed timely claims and that the time limit didn’t start running until the 2018 investigation into Strauss’ abuse made his conduct public. The men say that was when they first learned that the school had been aware of Strauss’ abuse and failed to protect them from him. Many also only realized then that they’d been victims of abuse since Strauss disguised his abuse as medical care, their lawyers said.

Among those named in the lawsuits is Rep. Jim Jordan, who was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State from 1986 to 1994 but insists he never knew what Strauss was up to. A spokesman for Jordan yesterday reiterated Jordan’s claim that he “never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have dealt with it.”

[AP / NBC News]

If Alabama Has To Fix Its Racist District Maps, So Does Louisiana

In another short, unsigned decision, the Court on Monday slapped down an “emergency” attempt by Louisiana to block a lower court’s finding that Louisiana has to redraw its congressional district maps to create at least two districts where Black voters have a chance to elect a congressional member of their choice. The Supreme Court refusal to fast-track the case follows its decision earlier this month to toss out a similar racial gerrymander in Alabama, a decision that left many surprised that the Court hadn’t decided to stomp a little more life out of the Voting Rights Act.

The case now goes back to the notoriously rightwing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which may end up affirming Louisiana’s contention that no, its racial gerrymander is very different and more constitutional than Alabama’s, so it’s entirely possible the case will still make it back to the Supremes next term anyway.

[CNN / TPM]

Hey Navajo Nation, You Get A Reservation. Water Rights Not So Much

In one of the more bizarre rulings in a while, the Court decided last week that the US government’s 1868 treaty with the Navajo Nation, which established the largest Native American reservation in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, didn’t actually require the government to ensure that the tribe would have access to water. ProPublica tries to explain what seems inexplicable: After decades trying to negotiate with the state of Arizona, the Navajo Nation sued, in hopes of getting the Court to define what the tribe’s water rights were, and to order Arizona to stop delaying and allow the Navajo Nation reliable access to water.

ProPublica notes that while tribes have always had to negotiate for water with states, the federal government has also acted on tribes’ behalf by “helping account for how much is needed and available.” But when it came to intervening in the protracted negotiations between the tribe and the state, the Court, in a 5-4 decision, said nah, not our job.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the tribe’s treaties do not impose “a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe.”

The case has been dragging through the federal courts since 2003, eventually accumulating briefs from “four states, more than 100 tribes and 27 trade groups representing mining companies and other water-intensive industries.” So much for all that! Now it’s back to the Navajo Nation trying to get an agreement with Arizona, which is already fighting to get enough dwindling Colorado River water for its very important subdivisions and agriculture barons.

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said he hopes an agreement may be more likely with Arizona’s new governor Katie Hobbs, who promised while campaigning last year that she would work with tribes to resolve water claims.

Following the Court’s decision last week, Hobbs announced the appointment of four tribal officials — from the Navajo Nation, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, the Gila River Indian Community, and the Ak-Chin Indian Community — to the “Governor’s Water Policy Council,” which already includes Maria Dadgar, the executive director of the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. So at least there’s a formal place at the water policy table, which is different from the water table (just a little hydrology joke there).

Justice Neil Gorsuch continued his advocacy for tribal rights with a scathing dissent in which he agreed with tribes that the 1868 treaty does so guarantee “enforceable water rights” that the federal government is obligated to define.

“The Navajo have tried it all. They have written federal officials. They have moved this Court to clarify the United States’ responsibilities when representing them. They have sought to intervene directly in water-related litigation,” Gorsuch wrote. “At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again.’”

ProPublica also notes — drily, as is only appropriate — that if negotiations with Arizona go nowhere, the Navajo Nation’s “other option is continuing a water adjudication case in state court that began in 1978, involves 14,000 claims and has no end in sight.”

[ProPublica / Gov. Katie Hobbs / NBC News]

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Supreme Court ‘Skeptical’ Of Student Debt Relief, If You Can Believe That!

Post By Politics alexander taylor, alito court, amy coney barrett, Biden administration, biden v. nebraska, brett kavanaugh, Congress, department of education v. brown, education department, elena kagan, elizabeth prelogar, fairness, government accountability office, heroes act, income-based repayment, john roberts, Ketanji Brown Jackson, low-income borrowers, major questions doctrine, missouri higher education loan authority, mohela, myra brown, national emergency, Neil Gorsuch, pandemic, pell grants, ppp loans, secretary of education, solicitor general, sonia sotomayor, standing, student debt, student loan forgiveness, student loan interest, student loan moratorium, supreme court, Trump administration

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in two cases challenging President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan, and dear readers, we hope you are sitting down for this: The Court’s rightwing majority didn’t sound very open to the idea that the administration has the authority to forgive student loans, even under the 2003 law that the administration says is designed to allow exactly that. We won’t know for sure until the Court rules in the case, probably in June.

If there’s any chance for the policy to escape being overturned, it probably hinges on whether the Court decides that the plaintiffs in the two cases have standing to sue at all. If the Court decides they don’t, then it won’t address the legality of the program either way.

Of course, this being the Alito Court, it’s also possible the Supremes will just make shit up and decide that even if the plaintiffs lack standing, some obscure principle pulled from Brett Kavanaugh’s beer cooler — if you know what we mean and we’re not sure we do — makes it OK to address the merits of the case anyway.

Under the Biden plan, borrowers could have up to $10,000 of federal student debt forgiven; borrowers who received Pell Grants for low income families qualified for up to $20,000 in debt cancelled. The vast majority of debt relief was targeted at middle and lower-income borrowers.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that the 2003 HEROES Act gives the Education Department all the authority it needs to make changes to student loan programs in a time of national emergency, since the law says the Education secretary has power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to keep borrowers from being wiped out financially during “a war or other military operation or national emergency.” And here we are, in a public health emergency so severe that most federal student loan payments have already been put on hold for almost three years.

Justice Elena Kagan agreed, saying that “Congress could not have made this much more clear,” and saying that compared to a lot of other cases, this was a slam dunk: “We deal with congressional statutes every day that are really confusing. This one is not.”

But of course nothing is clear if you don’t want it to be, so Chief Justice John Roberts kept insisting that whatever the plain text of the HEROES Act says, the total estimated cost of the debt relief program — about $400 billion over the next decade — was so big that it would need a specific extra double supersecret authorization from Congress, because of the “major questions doctrine” the Court pulled out of its ass in earlier cases under Roberts. To help make his point, Roberts repeatedly rounded that cost up by another hundred billion dollars, calling it a “half trillion dollar” program again and again.

Prelogar pointed out that the Education secretaries under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have already used their authority under the HEROES Act to put federal student loans in forbearance, with no interest accruing, since March of 2020. Pausing loan payments, she said, means the federal government has lost roughly $100 billion a year, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“That has been an economically significant program,” Ms. Prelogar said of the pause. “It’s currently costing the federal government more per year than this loan forgiveness plan would cost the government annually.

What’s more, Prelogar said, ending that pause without also relieving debt would mean that scads of borrowers would default on their loans altogether, which could result in a shock to the economy at large. She didn’t even get into the fact that if hundreds of thousands of people default, that’s going to cost the federal government a lot, plus the knock-on effects of those people being ruined financially.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor echoed that argument, pointing out that the stakes for low-income borrowers could be pretty darn catastrophic:

There’s 50 million students who are – who will benefit from this. Who today will struggle. Many of them don’t have assets sufficient to bail them out after the pandemic. They don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments. […]

And what you’re saying is now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them instead of the person with the expertise and the experience, the secretary of Education who’s been dealing with educational issues and the problems surrounding student loans.

We thought it was a pretty good argument, but then we’re liberal simps who think the government is there to help people, so we don’t count.

The question of whether the challengers to the policy have standing may be the best hope for the loan forgiveness program, since some of the rightwing justices seemed more skeptical of their claims that they’ll be harmed by student debt relief. We’ll just go with the CNN summary here:

In Biden v. Nebraska, a group of Republican-led states argued the administration exceeded its authority by using the pandemic as a pretext to mask the true goal of fulfilling a campaign promise to erase student loan debt.

The second case is Department of Education v. Brown, which was initially brought by two individuals who did not qualify for the full benefits of the forgiveness program and argue the government failed to follow the proper rulemaking process when putting it in place.

In the case involving the states, much of the argument involved how many angels can dance on the head of Missouri’s nonprofit agency what processes student loans, the “Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority,” aka MOHELA. It was set up to insulate the state itself from having to process loans, but the state is arguing that, for the purpose of standing, it may as well be the state.

But as Justice Kagan pointed out, MOHELA is a legally separate entity, and it didn’t choose to sue:

“Usually we don’t allow one person to step into another’s shoes and say, ‘I think that that person suffered a harm,’ even if the harm is very great,” she said.

If Missouri really controlled the loan authority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked James A. Campbell, Nebraska’s solicitor general, who represented the states, “why didn’t the state just make MOHELA come then?”

Campbell explained that was “a question of state politics,” which sounds to us like some bullshit, although we are not a lawyer.

Prelogar hammered on that point, saying that MOHELA would definitely have standing if it had sued, but it hadn’t, now had it? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chimed in too, saying that MOHELA’s

financial interests are totally disentangled from the state, it stands alone, it’s incorporated separately, the state is not liable for anything that happens to MOHELA. […] I don’t know how that could possibly be a reason to say that an injury to MOHELA should count as an injury to the state.

In the other case, the plaintiffs argued that the program isn’t fair, because their own loans don’t qualify for forgiveness. One plaintiff, Myra Brown, has private student loans that aren’t held by the government, and the other, Alexander Taylor, only qualifies for $10,000 in loan relief because he didn’t get a Pell grant in college, so his case claims he was cheated out of $10K in debt relief.

No, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense that they think the solution to their woes is to eliminate all debt relief for 40 million other people. But there we go, thinking like a blogger instead of a Supreme Court justice. The New York Times notes that

Justices across the ideological spectrum seemed unpersuaded by the borrowers’ position.

“Talk about ways in which courts can interfere with the processes of government through two individuals in one state who don’t like the program can seek and obtain a universal relief barring it for anybody anywhere,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said.

Even so, some justices were really excited about the supposed “unfairness” of targeting debt relief to people who had the most to lose, and not to everyone who might conceivably get help. Roberts even wondered why it would be fair to relieve debt for student loans during the pandemic but not for, say a loan taken out by a hypothetical owner of a lawn care business.

Sotomayor had a pretty quick reply to that, pointing out that “everybody suffered in the pandemic, but different people got different benefits because they qualified under different programs.” Hello, PPP loans, for freaking instance (this is us cheerleading, not Sotomayor). (Also, your Wonkette got a PPP loan, and it was forgiven, which is the first time we’ve ever been part of the “so rich the government gives you money” crew.)

Justice Kagan reminded Roberts that the case is actually about student loans, not anything else, mister strict constructionist:

Congress passed a statute that dealt with loan repayment for colleges, and it didn’t pass a statute that dealt with loan repayment for lawn businesses… [Us, butting in again: PPP loans! We already said PPP loans, Elena.] And so Congress made a choice, and that may have been the right choice or it may have been the wrong choice, but that’s Congress’s choice.

The Court will rule in June, and even if the debt forgiveness program is thrown out, many borrowers should at least be able to get some relief under the Biden administrations’ revamped income-based repayment program, which everyone with federal student loans should at least look into.

DO THIS NOW!

Did Joe Biden Just Fix Student Loan Debt Going Forward? Mayyyyybe!

I Got My Student Loans Ready For Joe Biden’s Big Income-Based Forgive-A-Thon And You Should Too

Until of course conservative states and the SCOTUS fuck that over too, the end.

[NYT / CNN / AP]

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