Month: July 2023

I've been obsessing over an obscure part of the Supreme Court ruling on student loan forgiveness. The relevant text of the HEROES Act says the Secretary of Education can "waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV," but Chief Justice Roberts makes a startling claim about this:

The Secretary does not identify any provision that he is actually waiving. No specific provision of the Education Act establishes an obligation on the part of student borrowers to pay back the Government. So as the Government concedes, “waiver”—as used in the HEROES Act—cannot refer to “waiv[ing] loan balances” or “waiving the obligation to repay” on the part of a borrower. Tr. of Oral Arg. 9, 64.

Huh. Students have been paying back loans for many years under threat of late fees; credit score downgrades; garnishment of wages, tax refunds, and Social Security; and court action. Given this, it sure seems like the law must establish an obligation to repay loans. And yet Roberts not only says it doesn't, he says the government "concedes" this point. He points to oral arguments, so let's go there:

GENERAL PRELOGAR:  The relevant decision memo specifically says, I hereby issue waivers and modifications of the relevant provisions of Title IV.

....JUSTICE BARRETT: And just to be clear, waiver in the statute refers to waiving the statutory and regulatory provisions, not waiving the obligation to repay?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: That's correct. So, if you kind of trace through the specific provisions that he invoked, they are statutory and regulatory provisions and they establish the terms of the student loan program and then also deal with discharge and cancellation authority. And he said that he was issuing  waivers and modifications of — of all of those provisions.

So you have to "trace through" all the provisions. And what are those provisions? The Office of Legal Counsel said this:

The provisions requiring individuals to repay student loans are...set forth in the U.S. Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. See, e.g., 20 U.S.C. § 1087dd(c) (requiring loans agreements to “provide[] for repayment of the principal amount of the loan”); 34 C.F.R. § 685.207 (“[a] borrower is obligated to repay the full amount of a Direct Loan”); id. § 682.102 (“[a] borrower is obligated to repay the full amount” of a loan under the FFEL Program); id. § 682.209 (“Repayment of a loan.”).

And they are “applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV” because they direct how financial assistance provided under title IV should be repaid. The Secretary may accomplish the cancellation or reduction of student debt by “waiv[ing] or modify[ing]” these provisions.

Sure enough, this all seems legit. The first statutory cite says loans "shall" be governed by a note that "provides for repayment of the principal amount of the loan, together with interest thereon, in equal installments." The second says, "A borrower is obligated to repay the full amount of a Direct Loan, including the principal balance, fees, any collection costs." The third says, "Generally, the borrower is obligated to repay the full amount of the loan, late fees, collection costs chargeable to the borrower." The fourth says, "For a Consolidation loan, the repayment period begins on the date the loan is disbursed [and so on for other types of loans]."

So Roberts is being pretty disingenuous when he says repayment can't be waived because there's no payment requirement in the first place. This is too clever by half. As common sense dictates, of course the law says loans have to be repaid—multiple times. This is true even if the repayment requirement isn't directly adjacent to other provisions and even if repayment happens to be to a third party servicer rather than directly to the government.

This kind of game playing makes me less sympathetic to Roberts's overall argument that "waive or modify" was never meant to be so expansive as to include outright cancellation of student loans. If his case were as strong as he thinks, he wouldn't need to include this kind of nonsense. But I still think the decision overall is a close call.

I've been aware of the "odd" anti-gay video that the Ron DeSantis campaign promoted on Friday, but I hadn't bothered to actually watch it. A few minutes ago I finally did.

It is not "odd." It is completely, beyond-all-parody batshit deranged. What the possible fuck could any of these people have been thinking? Be sure to watch to the end:

To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it…

pic.twitter.com/FT7LdW4vls

— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023

My jaw hasn't picked itself off the floor yet. I get that DeSantis is willing to say or do anything to show his anti-woke credentials, but this? What is he trying to prove, anyway?

The Wall Street Journal reports that inflation expectations are down:

Consumers expect to see 4.1% inflation a year from now, the lowest such reading in two years and down sharply from its recent peak of 6.8%, according to the median response to the New York Fed’s May survey, for example.

A year from now? The most conventional measure of inflation is year-over-year headline CPI. In May it clocked in at . . . 4.1%. That's down from 8.9% a year ago. I'll be shocked if it isn't below 3% a year from now, and 2% wouldn't surprise me.

Our long national egg nightmare is over:

Well, mostly over: There's been a brief spike upward in June for some reason. However, the average since 2022 is $2, and that's exactly where we are now.

METHODOLOGY NOTE: For some reason the USDA's weekly price survey occasionally covers only a tiny number of stores, which produces odd massive spikes just due to sampling errors. I've limited the data points in this chart to weeks in which the USDA sampled at least 100 stores.

This is a bright white clapboard house on the Eastern Shore of Virginia across the Chesapeake Bay from Richmond. It's on Highway 13 about an hour north of Norfolk. The setting sun provides a beautiful warm light, though only for a few minutes before everything sinks into shadows.

We're getting an early start to the silly season. Writers are getting bored because there's no interesting campaign news, so they're pulling out all the hoary cliches:

Give it up folks. RFK Jr. is a crackpot who will be soon forgotten. There will be no meaningful third-party competing in the general election. Republicans will not have a brokered convention. No one serious is going to primary Joe Biden. There will be no Democratic debates. The Electoral College will not end in a tie.

Sorry, I know it's boring. But in the end, Republicans will nominate someone who will then face off against Joe Biden for the White House. As usual, it will proceed perfectly normally and without any weird fanfare.

In the recent case 303 Creative v. Elenis, Lorie Smith asks the Supreme Court not to allow Colorado to force her to create websites for gay marriages. A day before the ruling was handed down, it was discovered that a customer request for just such a website, which was part of the judicial record, was fake.

This has prompted an outpouring of fury from liberals who believe the Court has been lied to—and since there's no longer evidence of specific harm the case should be summarily tossed out for lack of standing.

This needs to stop. This case never depended even slightly on the existence of an actual request for a website. All sides stipulated that standing to sue was based merely on a prospective "credible threat" that Colorado might force Smith to create a website that violated her deeply held convictions. That's it. This was accepted almost without discussion, and Sonia Sotomayor didn't breathe a single word of objection in her dissent.

Standing, for better or worse, is simply not an issue in this case. It was decided solely on the merits. The majority says it's a cut-and-dried First Amendment case: the state has no right to compel unwanted speech, even if its expression is related to the actions of a protected class (gay and lesbian customers). The dissent says that public accommodation laws do indeed force public businesses to provide "goods and services" to all customers equally, even if speech is incidentally involved:

Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class....The business argues, and a majority of the Court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services. That is wrong....The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment.

....For as long as public accommodations laws have been around, businesses have sought exemptions from them....This Court was unwavering in its rejection of those claims, as invidious discrimination “has never been accorded affirmative constitutional protections.” In particular, the refusal to deal with or to serve a class of people is not an expressive interest protected by the First Amendment.

The majority bases its decision on a very thin distinction indeed: Smith, they say, is innocent of illegal discrimination because she has said she will happily serve LGBT customers; she just won't sell them what they want. Soyomayor is unimpressed with this sophistry:

LGBT people do not seek any special treatment. All they seek is to exist in public. To inhabit public spaces on the same terms and conditions as everyone else....The First Amendment does not entitle petitioners to a special exemption from a state law that simply requires them to serve all members of the public on equal terms.

This is what the case is about. Can a state compel a business open to the public to treat the entire public equally, even if speech is incidentally involved? Or is the speech in this case far beyond "incidental" and therefore outside the state's legitimate interest? That's it. Standing never even comes into it.

Construction spending increased in May across the board. Nonresidential construction continued to grow, while residential construction increased for the first time in over a year:

Nonresidential construction was up at an annualized rate of 4%. Residential construction spiked upward at a 17% rate, though it was still 13% lower than a year ago.

The nonresidential number is strongly affected by various government spending programs (CHIPS, IRA) but its continuing strength is still a good sign for the health of the economy. The residential number is a bit of a mystery, but possibly indicates that the bust in the housing market is starting to turn around.

What with summer here, I had forgotten all about Southern California's huge spike in natural gas prices during the winter. Whatever happened to that? Here's the answer:

The whole thing lasted two months. Daily spot prices shot up in December from 100¢ per therm to 500¢ per therm and were back to 100¢ by February. The price charged by SoCal Gas is a monthly average and trails spot prices by a few weeks. The peak was 350¢ per therm in January and was back down to 100¢ by March.

The current spot price is 30¢ per therm. The current SoCal Gas procurement price is 40¢. Both are considerably lower than they were at this time last year.

Why did the price shock last such a short time? Two reasons: Unexpected chilly winter temps started to abate and a closed pipeline from Arizona was re-opened in mid-February. By early March everything was back to normal.

For the past few months I've been more fatigued than usual thanks to the CAR-T treatment. So I've been drowsily watching lots of prestige TV on HBO, which I accidentally subscribed to just before I went to City of Hope.

First I watched five seasons of The Wire. Then three seasons of Deadwood. Then eight seasons of Game of Thrones. Then five seasons of Boardwalk Empire. And now, for some reason, I've started watching a series called Warrior.

For a while now I've been trying to figure out what annoying trait ties them all together, and I think I finally have. It's not violence. Sure, a whole lot of people suffer a whole lot of bloody deaths in all of them, but that's because I chose violent shows in the first place. It comes with the territory.

No, the answer is: whorehouses. Endless, constant whorehouses and endless, constant, meaningless fucking in whorehouses and like environs. It's tiresome as hell, and it doesn't come with the territory. There's no special reason that just because a show is edgy and brutal it needs to feature whorehouses at all, let alone three or four times an hour.

Am I just being naive? Obviously lots of people enjoy sex and nudity on TV, and whorehouses are a handy way of getting it on screen. But that doesn't seem like the whole story. The sheer volume of whorehouse-mongering belies it. The showrunners want ten times more of it than any reasonable script can handle.

So go ahead. School me. What's up with this?