The Supreme Court has struck down Joe Biden's already meager student loan forgiveness program.
The nakedly partisan goals were to reinforce the idea that we cannot have a better society, and to shut down one of the more popular signature Biden program.
The fact that it will also have the effect of pulling billions of dollars out of the economy every month, making a recession, and a Republican victory next November, is just gravy:
In striking down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program, the Supreme Court ignored one of the most basic principles of law: When the text of a law is clear, it must be followed unless it is unconstitutional.
A federal statute, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act), explicitly authorizes the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” student loan obligations. That is exactly what President Biden did in his loan forgiveness program, but the court, ruling 6-3, decided that he lacked authority under the law to take this step, which would have helped more than 40 million people.
………
Two lawsuits were filed challenging this action. One was brought by two individuals who did not qualify for relief under the Biden program. The Supreme Court unanimously found that they lacked standing to sue because striking down the Biden program would not benefit them.
The other lawsuit was brought by Missouri and five other conservative states. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, none of these state governments would suffer any injury from the Biden student loan forgiveness program. In fact, just last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas and Louisiana lacked standing to challenge the Biden administration’s change in immigration policy. The court in that immigration law case said that a state cannot sue the federal government just because of an ideological disagreement with the president’s policies.
Based on that principle, the court should have thrown out Missouri’s suit as well. Yet Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the conservative majority, said the state could sue even though Missouri itself would suffer no costs from the Biden program. Another public agency, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority — which is legally and financially independent from the state — would incur some costs, but those costs don’t affect the state treasury. And that agency was not part of the lawsuit.
The court said that did not matter. Instead, Roberts invoked the “major questions doctrine,” the principle that a federal agency cannot act on a major question of economic or political significance unless it has clear direction from Congress. Roberts said whether the Secretary of Education can give this loan relief is a major question and that Congress was not sufficiently specific in authorizing such relief.
The major questions doctrine is recent, and made up full cloth, and it is little more than a back door to reinstate the Lockner era, where no government, federal, state, or local, had the power to regulate minimum wage, hours,etc.
But the statute says the secretary of education has authority to “waive or modify” student loan obligations. It is the heart of the law, and hard to imagine clearer language than that.
In the striking down the Biden administration’s action, the court ignored the statute’s plain language. If Congress wants to rewrite the law because it doesn’t like the Biden relief, it can do so, but that’s not the role of the court.
As I have said before, this is little more that corrupt partisan political hackery.
More broadly, the court’s reliance on the “major question” doctrine is hazardous. Nowhere is “major question” defined, and by raising it in this case, the court opens the door for challenges to government regulations of all sorts, including health and safety and environmental regulations.
The aforementioned Lockner Era.
This is corrupt and partisan, and it will only get worse unless the court sees a real threat to its power and its prestige.
Pack the court, ignore the court, or publicly state, "Let Justice Roberts enforce his decisions."
Also, investigate the whole judiciary, which has been packed by corrupt partisan ideologues for the past 40 years, as well as Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society's emoluments directed toward federal judges generally and toward the Supreme Court in particular.
As has been obvious since Bush v. Gore in 2000, there are no principled conservatives on the court, just corrupt hacks.
0 comments :
Post a Comment