President Alito to deny you student loan relief

A statute passed by Congress in 2003 gives explicit textual authorization for the president to provide student loan relief, and nobody has standing to challenge the executive action in an Article III court anyway. Will any of this matter to whether the program is upheld? Absolutely not:

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases, Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown, that ask the Court to strike down the student loan relief program. That program would provide $10,000 in relief to most borrowers who earned less than $125,000 a year during the pandemic, and $20,000 in relief to borrowers who received Pell Grants.

The Brown case is laughably weak, and no justice appeared to believe that federal courts have jurisdiction to hear this case. But the Supreme Court only to needs to assert jurisdiction over one of these two cases to kill the loan relief program, and the Court appeared likely to split along party lines in the Nebraska case. Though there is an off chance that Justice Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett might break from their fellow Republican appointees, all six of the GOP-appointed justices appeared inclined to kill the program.

And even if the Biden administration did convince Kavanaugh or Barrett to vote in their favor, that would not be enough. The administration would need both of their votes to prevail.

The justices are likely to strike down the program, moreover, despite the fact that the federal Heroes Act explicitly gives Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona broad authority to “waive or modify” many student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” such as the Covid-19 pandemic. As it turns out, the most important question in American law is not what the law actually says, it is whether the nine justices on the Supreme Court think the policy is a good idea.

Almost immediately after the argument began, the justices split into two partisan camps. The Court’s three Democratic appointees largely argued that the judiciary’s job is to follow the text of federal law. As Justice Elena Kagan put it at one point, the Heroes Act is “really quite clear here” that this student loan forgiveness program is allowed. Under this approach, that should be the beginning and the end of the Court’s inquiry (although it’s worth noting that the three Democratic justices also asked questions suggesting that they do not believe that federal courts have jurisdiction to hear this case).

A handful of questions by Kavanaugh and Barrett aside, the six Republican appointees spent much of the argument fixated on concerns that if this student debt relief program is upheld, then the Biden administration would have too much power. Notably, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar received some of the harshest questions from Chief Justice John Roberts — ordinarily the most moderate member of the Court’s Republican bloc — who immediately criticized the size of the program because, he claimed, it will lead to “half-a-trillion dollars” in loan obligations being waived.

The Court’s Republican appointees spent much of the argument discussing policy disagreements with President Biden that have nothing whatsoever to do with the question of whether this loan forgiveness program is legal. Roberts, along with Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, for example, all took turns criticizing Prelogar’s position because this loan program benefits student borrowers and not, say, someone who took out a loan to start a lawn care business.

The obvious response to this legally irrelevant objection to this program is that, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “Congress passed a statute that deals with loan repayment” for student borrowers, and it didn’t pass a statute that provides loan forgiveness to people who own lawn care businesses.

It would be too charitable to say that the Court’s Republicans are ignoring the statutory text. Their position is that the president can’t use the legal authority explicitly given to it by Congress because they don’t like the policy choice Congress made.

Here’s the most telling moment from Bad King John:

Roberts says the Biden order “modified” student-loan programs in the same way that the French Revolution “modified” the status of the French nobility.— Matt Ford (@fordm) February 28, 2023

“[Democratic] Presidents Can’t Govern Because That’s Our Prerogative: The John Roberts Story.”