Another day, another Supreme Court opinion. In yet another unsurprising decision, the conservative majority ruled today that President Biden's student loan forgiveness program violates the law. The key argument is about the meaning of the president's authority under the HEROES Act to "waive or modify" the student loan program:
The Secretary’s plan has “modified” the cited provisions only in the same sense that “the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility”—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely....Labeling the Secretary’s plan a mere “modification” does not lessen its effect, which is in essence to allow the Secretary unfettered discretion to cancel student loans. It is “highly unlikely that Congress” authorized such a sweeping loan cancellation program “through such a subtle device as permission to ‘modify.’ ”
The Secretary responds that the Act authorizes him to “waive” legal provisions as well as modify them....Here, 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.
....The sharp debates generated by the Secretary’s extraordinary program stand in stark contrast to the unanimity with which Congress passed the HEROES Act. The dissent asks us to “[i]magine asking the enacting Congress: Can the Secretary use his powers to give borrowers more relief when an emergency has inflicted greater harm?” The dissent “can’t believe” the answer would be no. But imagine instead asking the enacting Congress a more pertinent question: “Can the Secretary use his powers to abolish $430 billion in student loans, completely canceling loan balances for 20 million borrowers, as a pandemic winds down to its end?” We can’t believe the answer would be yes. Congress did not unanimously pass the HEROES Act with such power in mind.
Elena Kagan's dissent takes the opposite view:
The Secretary has the linked power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” applying to the student-loan programs. To start with the phrase after the verbs, “the word ‘any’ has an expansive meaning.” “Any” of the referenced provisions means, well, any of those provisions.
....In the HEROES Act, the dominant piece of context is that “modify” does not stand alone. It is one part of a couplet: “waive or modify.” The first verb, as discussed above, means eliminate—usually the most substantial kind of change. So the question becomes: Would Congress have given the Secretary power to wholly eliminate a requirement, as well as to relax it just a little bit, but nothing in between? The majority says yes. But the answer is no, because Congress would not have written so insane a law.
There is nothing deeper in either the majority opinion or the dissent. The question is whether "waive or modify" allows the president merely to change the conditions of student loans or whether it allows him to eliminate the loans altogether. The majority says one thing and the dissent says the other, and the truth is that neither provides any kind of persuasive argument. They simply assert their sides.
I don't find this ruling objectionable. Compare it to yesterday's affirmative action ruling. The key error in that decision was the finding that affirmative action is legal, but only for a temporary period. That's wholly invented. There is nothing in either the Constitution or in statute that even hints at the idea that affirmative action must be time limited. If affirmative action were flatly illegal, that would be one thing, and the majority should have made that case. But having accepted that it's not illegal, they have no basis for a mere opinion that they find it tiresome that it's gone on so long.
There's no such problem in today's case. There is simply a disagreement over the words "waive or modify"—a phrase with enough looseness that it can reasonably be interpreted multiple ways. For my money, I think the majority has the slightly better of the argument, but it's a close call. It could have gone either way.
"It could have gone either way."
Not with 6 "conservatives" on the court. No way they were going to allow educated elites to have a free education.
"Elites" don't have any problem paying off student loans.
Maybe I was too obtuse in my comment but "conservatives" consider any educated and liberal person an elite, regardless of their economic status.
I can make two hundred bucks an hour working on my home computer. I never thought it was possible, but my closest friend made seventeen thousand USD in just five weeks working on this historic project. convinced me to take part. For more information,
Click on the link below... https://GetDreamJobs1.blogspot.com
I do find both decisions objectionable. The law says "waive" and "modify". It does not set limits. The limits come in through the "Major Questions Doctrine" which is very useful because it is flexible, how much is too much is entirely in the eye of the beholder. There can be little doubt that the student loan forgiveness program would pass muster if it came from a GOP administration.
Of course the affirmative action case is far worse in its deliberate ignorance of history.
The law says "waive" and "modify". It does not set limits.
Agreed. I find there's a growing trend in constitutional jurisprudence to "let Congress off the hook" when it comes to textual meaning. If they wanted limits, they should have written some into the law.
The limits come in through the "Major Questions Doctrine" which is very useful because it is flexible
This decision might actually be politically helpful to Democrats, both by helping to fight inflation and also by giving young people another reason to be angry at Republicans.
But the more analysis I read about this decision, the more I agree with Kagan: Roberts's opinion was atrociously reasoned, and nakedly activist.
But that leads me to a question: purely on the legal reasoning front, did the court really need to cite the made-up "Major Question" doctrine? Couldn't they have simply declared that the covid emergency is over, and that Congress didn't intend for the HEROES Act to provide open-ended, perpetual relief after the end of an emergency? I think for the court's credibility, they'd have been better off finding a narrower reasoning...
yes
This is idiotic, and it renders any other opinions you make on legal matters questionable.
The President was given explicit authorization to waive or modify any statutory provision of the student loan program. He used this power to modify the part of the statutes saying how much people have to repay.
This is as near to black-letter law as we can get, and the Supreme Court simply ignored it.
You're finding this unobjectionable is absurdly poor judgement.
You even undercut yourself by quoting Kagan, and then lying about what she said. Kagan does not simply assert her side. She provides unanswerable reasoning and you show us it, and then pretend she didn't do what she did.
No. There's a disagreement over the words “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision." You leaving out that latter part is disingenuous.
What's also nuts is the majority explaining that borrowers have no legal obligation to repay the government, so there's nothing to waive, which means the loans can't be waived, which means they're legally obligated to be repaid. My god! This by your lights unobjectionable?
You can't disagree without being disagreeable?
You're allowed free speech on here, but there's no need to insult the person providing the space for it.
Like +5.
Like +6
Like +7
I don't know, Kevin's statement that neither side provides much in the way of evidence when the law is clear as day is pretty objectionable.
Maybe he didn't have to saw it was idiotic, but this is a really, really bad take by Kevin.
Jeeze, you are awfully thin skinned on Kevin's behalf. First, this comment was more in the the nature of strong disagreement than disagreeable. And second, Kevin's legal view (N.B. he is not a lawyer; I am a retired one) here is, frankly, risible and worth being disagreeable to. Yet again the corrupt right wing SCOTUS majority simply rewrites a statute to reach a judgement that accords with their politics, not the law. (Moreover, this is the second time in the last ten days or so that Kevin has expressed appalling legal judgement; last week he preposterously wrote that the revelation that Whinin' Sammy Alito also has a billionaire sugar daddy was "weak tea." Happily, that post had zero defenders last I looked.)
You can't disagree without being disagreeable?
Ah, tone policing. The first and last refuge of those who don't have a substantive argument.
Kevin is not capable of either providing me with free speech rights nor denying them to me in this space. Talking about a comments section on a private non-commercial website as if they had anything to do with speech rights is a category error.
How about the concept of being polite to the host who's giving you the platform on which to to comment? How about the concept of graciousness?
Uh, actually I mostly agree with you on this one, fool
DELETED
Indeed. Congress wrote and passed (unanimously!) a law that gave the executive pretty sweeping powers. The law says what it says and it couldn't be clearer. It gives blanket powers to the executive to do whatever it wants with not just the regulatory provisions, but also the statutory provisions. SCOTUS just decided to ignore it for partisan reasons and they're probably going to get away with it not causing too much damage to their public image (which Roberts is allegedly concerned about).
Not enough hay has been made in the media over exactly what Kagan was highlighting ("waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision" means that the executive branch can do whatever the fuck it pleases with those provisions), but then the media is pretty bad about reporting on legal matters as they tend to treat all sides as equally deserving even when one or more arguments is entirely without merit.
"What's also nuts is the majority explaining that borrowers have no legal obligation to repay the government, so there's nothing to waive, which means the loans can't be waived, which means they're legally obligated to be repaid."
Yeah, that line didn't make sense to me. If there's no legal obligation to repay, why are we even talking about this? The government can't tell people they don't have to repay loans that they don't have to repay? I'm guessing the Education Act of 1965 sets out frameworks for providing subsidized loans but doesn't specify how loans work, or something. But if the act builds on legal requirements of loans, that becomes a provision of the law, even if it isn't explicitly stated.
The President was given explicit authorization to waive or modify any statutory provision of the student loan program. He used this power to modify the part of the statutes saying how much people have to repay.
Ok, I'll bite. Is there any language in the HEROES Act enabling principal write downs, or was the "waive modify" provision intended solely to enable actions regarding the terms of loans like forbearances, interest rate reductions, and so on? Is there anything on the record concerning Congress's intent regarding this issue twenty years ago? If the answer is "no" that at least suggests a degree of ambiguity as to the law's meaning. Relatedly, had the act been used in the past to write down principal? If not, then at minimum the administration's use of this law in such a manner is novel.
I agree the standing issue with respect to this case is extremely shaky. But I must admit I'm torn on the substance of the decision. I think Kevin's basically correct here: it's an arguable proposition.
Agreed. And I _really_ don't like the ruling. Not saying it was poorly reasoned or defective in some other way; there is, unfortunately wiggle room in the wording of the original statute.
This is true, even though I still think the ruling is incorrect. I think it would have been clearer if the president had just cancelled all outstanding loans. Surely, waiving all of the terms of a loan (cancelling it) would qualify as waiving any statutory or regulatory terms.
Waiving only a specific amount of some loans (as surely would have happened for anyone with outstanding balances that weren't exactly $10,000/20,000 or less) is a small stretch to call it modifying the statutory/regulatory terms by modifying the balance.
A childless robot doesn't have a problem with crushing debt for the youth.
I am SHOCKED I tell you.
“Crushing” debt?
The last stats I remember gave the median debt total of ~ 20k per student. About the cost of an okay used car.
You really have no idea how big that is for someone just out of college. How old ARE you?
I owed way more than that (adjusted for inflation) when I graduated. I paid if off in about eight years. It was a pain in the butt, but manageable. And yes, there were some things I'd have liked do be doing in my 20s (foreign travel, nice cars, etc) that more affluent friends could do...but I couldn't. C'est la vie.
For the record I think America's higher ed finance system sucks. I believe every American should be able to acquire a debt-free college degree (not necessarily cost-free, but definitely debt free).
And Lord knows a sizeable number of US students owe more than $20K by the time they graduate (or, more tragically, don't graduate). But quite honestly, $20K really isn't a particularly burdensome level of debt. A minimum wage worker in my home state could pay that off devoting 10% of their income for about seven years. And most college grads earn well above minimum wage.
An "okay used car" does not cost $20K. That's more like the cost of an okay new car (Altimas and Accords run in the 25-28k range for 2023).
Also, your memory is incorrect. Median/average debt is closer to 29-33K. At an average interest rate of say 5% (the rates vary depending on what year the loans were disbursed), the monthly payment on a 31K balance is $328. In debt-to-income ratio terms, that's about $13,120 in additional annual salary that someone would have to make for that payment not to have a negative impact on their housing.
That's a large additional monthly payment for someone just out of school and it substantially delays things like household formation, homebuying, and birth rates while also having a negative impact on things like personal health choices. It also means they're driving older, riskier cars or perhaps can't afford a car so are subject to long commutes via public transportation, and the deleterious effects on physical and mental health from that as well.
I suppose I agree that ~$300/mo is not an insubstantial amount, for everyone but the top quintile or so. (I personally owed 40k and just never paid, until I could afford to pay them off in a few big chunks. Not caring about mortgages and credit scores is probably not the norm).
My policy preferences are weakly held, but student loan forgiveness seems somewhat arbitrary a target for spending. I’d rather it go for homeless or prisons (making them less like hellholes) or UBI, international aid. I also see the rationale for “doing what we can, when we can, politically”… just not sure I like it.
I don’t have loans so it’s not a big deal to me. Despite all the wailing from the media and political class, most people are like me. We don’t care about affirmative action, we knew this loan forgiveness was a gimmick, and don’t want to patronize a business owned by a religious fanatic. They should put up a sign! No fags or trannies!
No Trump fags and no Ginni Thomas trannies!
"The Secretary’s plan has 'modified' the cited provisions only in the same sense that 'the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility'—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely."
I guess the conservatives on the Court are apaprently a pack of royalists.
Probably not surprising.
Not a lawyer, but didn’t Roberts give Biden a big out here?
Roberts beef seems to be that Biden took “modify” to mean “abolish” and Roberts disagreed with that definition.
But doesn’t that mean Biden could knock down the principal amount by 90 or 95% — in other words, very explicitly not “abolish” the loans — and that would be equivalent to leaving the French nobility a bit of their nobility, and thus, in Roberts’ implicit view, not a misdefinition of “modify”?
If they claim Affirmative Action is legal and Constitutional, why is it their place to eliminate a legal and Constitutional law?
It seems like arbitrary corruption, but it's not that arbitrary because it comes with a purpose, to make education as difficult and costly and as absent in life as possible, because, if few know anything, anything can be demagogued so much more easily.
This isn't the worst decision in the world, but the framework this court is creating is troubling. What it boils down to is that any time Congress gives the executive branch more authority than the Court feels the executive should have (highly dependent on whether the judges like the policy in question) the Court will strike it down, regardless of what Congress said in the law. "Surely they didn't mean THAT!" If they didn't mean that, Congress should have written the law differently. The language in the HEROES act is extremely broad.
And to get this judgment, they're being rather interpretive with words in a way conservatives have criticized liberals for years. I think any reasonable person (including the Congress that passed it) would consider loan forgiveness to be, at its core, a modification of the terms of the loan, not an "abolition" of the loan. I think they're judging not by what the law says but by how bothered they are by the size of the effects of its application, and that doesn't seem like a good road to go down. Especially not with this court.
Broader question: just how much of its authority/responsibility may Congress delegate to the other branches? In the extreme, does the Constitution allow the Legislative branch to say “We don’t want to have to worry about anything any more. Let the Executive do it all?”
Actually, yes.
In the student loan case, the Secretary of Education can forgive loans--that's explicit. The question here is can it be done using an emergency declaration? Following ordinary rules can take forever, especially if there are of lot of legal challenges. You have to follow the rules about changing the rules. IF there is an appropriate emergency, then there can be exceptions about changing the rules.
You have to follow the rules about changing the rules.
THIS. I'm frankly astonished at the number of people who don't get that.
"Surely they didn't mean THAT!" If they didn't mean that, Congress should have written the law differently. The language in the HEROES act is extremely broad.
Bingo.
Our Supreme Court has become an unelected, alternate national legislature. At least members of Congress don't serve for life.
The term 'waive and modify' cannot be interpreted to mean 'waive and modify but only in a manner and degree acceptable to us Supreme Court justices!'
This is not a debate over the meaning of 'waive and modify' because the legislation does not include any language indicating that the manner and degree of the waiver or modification is limited or should be reviewed by a court.
Kevin accepted Roberts misframing of the matter.
I disagree.
Conservative SCOTUS is selectively decontextualizing the law to allow it to argue semantics over the meaning of "modify". It is clear that the law bifurcates "waive" from "modify". If Congress granted the power to "waive", it gave the administration the power to waive enforcement, not just "modify" it. That is as straight a line as you can draw.
But nope, Conservative SCOTUS will not have it. Whereas it has no constitutional citation to back its arbitrary action, it has to look elsewhere. So Conservative SCOTUS does what it excels in: Drawing squiggly lines that flip-flop and go around and forth until it finds a target it always intended to hit.
Also, can't wait to see what you have to say about 303 Creative. For background, you should read this from The New Republic.
After taking that into context, it's clear the litigant had no standing; it was all manufactured to create a false narrative to file a lawsuit.
The student loan case also had nobody with standing to bring up the case: nobody was injured by it and MOHELA didn't even want to bring up the case so SCOTUS just deemed Missouri as having standing for no particular reason. But whatever. Procedure and facts are for losers, the winners just create their own standing and case details out of thin air.
I had the same feeling. A non-profit, whose raison d'etre was made moot, at least for a bunch of borrowers, for which a different agency therefore claims "injury" to the state. This, despite that very agency having the power to forgive loans.
I mean, WTF.
But, the deciding factor was about who benefits from the interpretation. If it is corrupt billionaires, then the ruling would be in their favor. If it is anyone else, tough luck.
100%.
The problem with the decision is the imposition of the “major question” doctrine where the Court goes beyond the reading of a statute to assure its preferred outcome. To be sure the major question doctrine is a recent conservative doctrine applied to overturn laws conservatives don’t like. The application of the law involves guesswork and divination with no guidance whatsoever except to apply it when they feel like it. The issue at hand is very simple, either the statute allows the “emergency” action taken by the executive or not. Since I personally consider Covid to be an emergency situation I would say yes. However, one may certainly argue that the secretary overshot its target (perhaps a better tailored program would pass constitutional muster where the loan provision are waived for those affected one way or another by Covid.)
Now that's over, maybe we can get back to the more sensible plan of eliminating all interest on those loans so they don't stretch into forever.
The Biden Income-Based Repayment Plan modifications actually do this!
The amount of income that is exempt is raised, and the percent of income beyond that amount that is required as payment is halved, and...if your repayment amount is less than the interest you owe, that interest is written off!
You know, while I agree it would be nice to forgive student loan debt, and further, agree that there are legal ways to get there, it doesn't solve the problem. So say that all student debt on the books is forgiven for the sake of argument. What about the debt of next year's cohort? And the one after that and the one after that? No, the problem to address is how the cost of eduction has been weaponized by, shall we say, the usual suspects.
Agree 100%.
Even 20 years ago when I was in school and the tuition/debt levels were still building into a crisis, it was obvious that schools (even state schools, like the one I attended) were raising prices as high as they thought they could. And the university presidents seemed to essentially just be fundraisers for what was basically a foundation that didn't give out anything that couldn't have been publicly funded to begin with (other than the big athletic departments exploiting unpaid labor for billions, which is a whole other thing...). I'm not sure what the root cause is/was, but it seemed like perhaps a lack of funding at the source: states first, but maybe also federal.
Like you said - the usual suspects.
I'm neutral on this but I think it missed the same problem, which is almost intractable if the court refuses to look at reality, which I thought the dissent did well in the affirmative action ruling.
Student loan debt is a drag on a person's career, life and well-being. It can be a load to carry, and while the student makes the decision to do it, whereas they don't choose to be a minority, the outcome is, in effect, the same, they inherit, or take on a burden that creates an unequal playing field with someone else who by wealth, color or some other advantage doesn't have.
In the cases of minority's, especially blacks, who faced centuries of racism and discrimination (and it was way worse than I knew, and probably most of us know), hand waving that away is an abomination. But, student loan debt isn't entirely dissimilar because the net effect is the same, which is that a bunch of privileged, usually white, people have created a system that advantages them, at the expense of everything else.
There could be worse outcomes, and worse racism than there is today, but the court is acting like none of that existed or even happened.
Edit: Another thought, this problem almost certainly requires a legislative solution, which is impossible right now, and if one even made it through, who's to say it won't get sued out of existence with these guys calling balls and strikes the way they do.
"There is simply a disagreement over the words "waive or modify"—a phrase with enough looseness that it can reasonably be interpreted multiple ways."
If it can be reasonably interpreted multiple ways, it should be the congress & not the courts that clears up any ambiguity.
This is simply six right wing Republicans who are using their position to nullify Democratic policies. Look for this to be the norm for the next 20 years or so. We are back to the Gilded Age.
Kagan's dissent covers three separate areas: standing, the interpretation issues discussed by Kevin, and the court's decision to rule not on a point of law but of politics, usurping authority delegated by Congress to the Executive.
For standing, she notes how the court has previously not conflated corporations formed by but not run by states from the states themselves, and that MOHELA (the corporate agency in question), which stands to lose millions from the waivers, has chosen not to file suit. I see nothing in Roberts' opinion that meaningfully counters Kagan's objections: the majority simply asserts that Missouri has standing by conflating MOHELA and the state. Worse, the majority assert that the harm done to Missouri stems from the loss of fees paid to MOHELA. MOHELA administers these loans for state residents. But if the purpose of the agency (and the fees paid to it) relate to the loans, and the loans are forgiven, how does that represent harm? "I am entitled to money in exchange for providing a service I no longer need to provide" is a rather strange formulation, even if the agency coordinates other college loans from other sources which will continue.
Kagan also argues that the court acts because it has accrued to itself the authority to decide whether a power in Congress' control and granted by it to the Executive branch may be exercised by that branch if doing so is deemed by the Court to be governed by the invented "major-questions doctrine." Kagan notes the original 2003 law may have been poorly written: having looked it up, I'd say so, as it seems aimed primarily at supporting college students or graduates in military service during a time of war or emergency. But it defines emergency in a broad way and it assigns authority broadly to the secretary. It also has a reporting requirement, which to my mind suggests that Congress justified the overbroad language by expecting to conduct its own oversight of the authority given.
Why a majority of justices on the Supreme Court are entitled to override public policy on the grounds that Congress granted the Executive branch too much of its own power escapes me. Congress ought to be responsible for "fixing" the problem here, if there is one. But Congress cannot act because of the current political situation. The principle that, in such circumstances, the Supreme Court should step in, seems as dubious now with a conservative majority as it would be under a liberal one. Roberts claimed his job was to be calling "balls and strikes." But this intervention reinforces a doctrine whereby the court can simply declare a broadly-stated legal delegation of Congressional authority as "too big" and place limits on it arbitrarily.
I am a bit surprised at Kevin apparently taking Roberts' comparison of the Department of Education forgiving student debt to people being executed during the French Revolution as a fair analogy. Roberts also claims that making such a loan waiver at the end of the COVID emergency period is clearly not what Congress intended, but that is disingenuous at best: if Congress grants an authority which lasts for the duration of a declared emergency period, on what grounds does Roberts complain that an action taken under such authority was taken near the end of the period? If Congress grants a president war powers during a war, do those powers last the duration of the war, or do they suddenly fade away if the war is ALMOST over? The latter claim is unintelligible. If someone has authority for a defined period, the use of that authority over the entire defined period is kosher, because that is why you would define the period of authority in the first place!
Reading the original law (very short, search for HEROES Act 2003 and look yourself), I strongly doubt Congress had any deliberate intention of authorizing the Education Secretary to forgive student loans during a non-war emergency. They just wrote and passed a sloppy piece of legislation, which was allowed to stand for 20 years and is still in place. But that doesn't prove that what they wrote doesn't permit this exercise of authority.
Exactly.
Congress very clearly granted this power to the Executive branch. While I agree that the law is overly broad and probably not intended for this purpose, that doesn't change what the law actually says. And what the law says could not be clearer.
Roberts isn't calling balls and strikes here. He's making up reasons for enforcing rules ("major questions") that don't exist.
So if Congress decided one day to pack it in and pass a law granting all of the rights and responsibilities of the Legislative to the Executive you would assert the Judicial should not be involved?
pass a law granting all of the rights and responsibilities of the Legislative to the Executive
All?
This is fanciful reasoning, because numerous powers exercised by Congress are explicitly authorized by plain constitutional language. Clearly Congress cannot grant the president the power to impeach, or the power to override his own vetoes, or the power to make laws. And so on.
But Congress can grant the president broad powers to administer and enforce laws it itself enacts.
Although I mostly agree, you're wrong about "the power to make laws". Congress delegates the power to make laws extensively to the president. Laws made by the Executive are called "rules" or "regulations", but they're every bit as enforceable as statutes, and by the same mechanisms.
Well stated! But aside from your first point, there seems to be a bit of wiggle room. A bit. Oh I agree it was definitely a case of 'Verdict first, then trial' and I agree it was nakedly self-serving. I'll agree in spades if you say the way the majority went about it makes them out to be real stumblebums.
But as to your _first_ point ... IANAL (Thank God!) This court has taken, um, an unorthodox view of who has standing and who has not. I categorize this -- and the shadow docket, of course -- as being in the same class, let's call it the whiter shade of pale class.
The authority to waive or modify seems to apply only to an emergency. Did Congress really mean to allow the President to change the law drastically and permanently just because he declares an emergency? Where is such power explicit in the law? If Trump declares an immigration emergency in his next term will that allow him to change laws at will?
Maybe the law would authorize forgiving the payments during the emergency but this does not seem to have come up on either side (although I have not studied either the law or he decision).
I got news for you: Congress and all the state legislatures write lots of sloppily-worded laws. Normally, regular people that run afoul of them don’t get to claim “well the legislature didn’t really mean that” when they’re in trial for violating one of those sloppy laws.
Case in point: most of the shitty antiabortion laws have exceptions for “life of the mother” that don’t actually spell out what that means. Does the mother have to be 5 minutes away from dying or is 5 months away from dying sufficient? Hasn’t stopped those states’ doctors from facing lawsuits and criminal charges just because the law is poorly worded.
Congress wrote that presidents can change the terms of student loans in emergencies. That’s clearly worded law. The fact that congress may have meant “emergencies” to equal “only wars” or “natural disasters” or whatever is congress’s problem to sort out, not the courts.
I got news for you: Congress and all the state legislatures write lots of sloppily-worded laws.
Um, yeah. Of course. Obviously. Are you naive enough to think this was 'by accident'? The wording of the second amendment is no accident; the phrase 'the security of the state' is not a reference to foreign antagonists; no, the reference is to successful slave rebellions. Also, Newtie's fine was not a fine, amirite?
Being sloppily worded is a feature, not a bug. The only question is how carefully do you have to craft the law to navigate Charybdis and Scylla.
Also there are a lot of other sloppy laws that allow presidents to do lots of other things during “emergencies.” Things like invade other countries or render “enemy combatants” to remote locales like Gitmo. Is that ok? I mean, perhaps congress really didn’t mean for those powers to be used in non-self-defense scenarios, but it hasn’t stopped previous presidents from using those powers. Why is waving student debt beyond the pale, just because it wasn’t shoved into a “National Security” frame?
The actual language of the law does explicitely state this ability to waive or modify any and all provisions. It does not put bounds or limits on how drastic those changes can be.
The 'But what if Trump did it' is precisely the logic that Roberts used, but there is no legal basis for determining a ruling based on whether or not you approve of the policitician who is empowered to act by the law.
The multimillionaire doesn't find this ruling objectionable. Quelle surprise!
Kevin: Read up on standing to file a lawsuit. You will understand the horror we lawyers feel at these decisions- website/student loan.
I am so confused about what the alleged harm even was by that astroturfed woman in Colorado (or wherever). If she refused to serve a same-sex couple (if she even did website design services, which it sure sounds like the ADF just created her website design business as a front for their lawsuit)... what harm, exactly, would she be suffering?
I am not a lawyer
So how does this affect Payroll Protection Plan loan forgiveness ?
IIRC that legislation explicitly set a plain language standard for loan forgiveness, based on (re) hiring numbers.
Leaving aside commenting directly on the decision, the result places the Feds back with managing the debt students incurred due to State decreasing funding of schools and accumulating all the critiques.
Trying to address this at the Federal level would be a short term fix and politically rewarding action, but doesn't not resolve the fact that student debt is primarily driven by the amount States are willing to fund their schools. The pundits and advocates for student relief really need to be addressing it there, but it's easier to address at a single source....the Feds.
Well, obviously those who had their cancellation cancelled by the right should say they need the debt reduction to start a business that refuses to do any work for gay people.
MAGA --they're what if you were in the Manson cult but still couldn't get laid.
Blue-balled nuts.
This is one of a series of posts in which Drum seems to what to make the current Court seem reasonable. If they are reasonable that is something worth doing. But if they are not reasonable, it is counterproductive to pretend that they are reasonable. In this case Drum's case seems pretty weak.
In particular he represents each argument in short summaries of lengthy arguments and then complains that they state their view rather than give their argument. But a summation of their view is likely to look like that. And Kagan's view, even in that short summary, seems to be a pretty strong argument. Other accounts of the case seem to confirm the nature of the argument.
The law in question gives the Secretary of Education the right to waive or modify the student loans. Despite many on the left wanting the loans waived, Biden chose to do something more modest and forgive a portion of the loans, that is to modify them, not to waive them. But Roberts argument is that that is a very big modification. That is, he is reading the law as saying that the Biden Administration can waive the loans or make modest modifications to them, but can't make larger changes to them. That is he is acting like there are three categories, waiving, modifying, and something between waiving and modifying and that congress allowed for the first two, but the Biden Adminstration broke the rules by choosing the third. There is no support in English for such a thing. It is hard to see anything but bad faith allowing someone to reach that conclusion. Maybe if the only choice was to modify the loans one might think that they were not allowing for such large modifications. But they explicitly allow for modifying the loans to the point of wiping them out altogether.
Roberts "argument" here seems to capture the absurdity of what he is doing here. What he is saying (apparently quoting an earlier decision in which it might have made more sense) is that this is like saying that the French Revolution modified the status of the French nobility. And it is true that French Revolution didn't modify the status of the French nobility, it waived that status entirely. But that analogy suggests that what Biden did was allowed. The example is supposed to make what Biden did seem absurd, but it really just makes Roberts look absurd.
The claim that "No specific provision of the Education Act establishes an obligation on the part of student borrowers to pay back the Government" has to be wrong. It says that student borrowers have no legal obligation to repay their loans. I'm certain that there are a lot of student debtors out there who can testify that is not true.
The loan agreement(s) you sign establish the obligation, not necessarily the terms of the Education Act, but it still seems weird.
I would argue that simply referring to "loans" definitionally incorporates the obligation to repay. If the Act speaks of loans, then it contains a provision stating the obligation to repay.
Kevin, you see no decisive argument from either side, doesn't that mean the Court should have stayed out of the thing?
Since most of the people in the majority have proven to be wrong again and again, I'll side with the dissent, thank you very much.
Pingback: Großmächte reformieren Gerichte, feuern Reichensteuern ein und kleben sich in Harvard auf die Straße - Vermischtes 06.07.2023 - Deliberation Daily