John Roberts demonstrates a justified lack of confidence in his arrogation of congressional and presidential authority

At the conclusion of his opinion denying student loan relief to large numbers of people in Biden v. Nebraska, John Roberts cannot help but be offended by the unanswerable dissent:

I include the previous paragraph here as well because it describes how the majority both invokes the transparently nonsensical “major questions” doctrine and then claims that it is not actually necessary to reach the Court’s conclusion. I’m not sure which is more ridiculous, the doctrine itself or the idea that ordinary statutory construction can plausibly lead to the Court’s conclusion.

Anyway, Roberts is defensive for very good reason: no plaintiff in this case had standing, and the HEROES Act very, very clearly authorized the debt cancellation program the Court claims it did not.

On the standing question, as Kagan points out these are all obviously ideological plaintiffs who have suffered no injury from Biden’s program:

As Kagan says, MOHELA would certainly have standing to bring the case — but they didn’t participate in any way, and the state of Missouri itself is not affected in any way by the debt relief program. “The majority,” Kagan correctly says. “does not over-expend itself in defending that action.”

The Court’s argument on the merits is even worse. The HEROES Act gives the Secretary of Education the power to “modify or waive any statutory provision” related to student loan programs in the event of a (fairly strictly defined) emergency context. This is what the Secretary did, which should be the end of this case. Instead, the Court reaches the utterly bizarre conclusion that Congress was authorized the Secretary to do nothing in between minor changes and full waivers:

In addition to bering inconsistent with the plain text of the statute, the majority’s construction is also inconsistent with its general purpose. And of course if you apply the majority’s logic the Trump administration’s payment pause was also illegal:

Of course, there’s a reason why Trump was able to use the emergency delegations of power given to it as it pleased. The Court’s invented doctrines valid only in cases of the policy disagreement that is obviously the sole motivating factor behind the Court’d decision. Despite its protests, the Court ends up invoking the get-out-of-text free doctrine because it believes that Democratic presidents cannot be trusted with governmental authority:

While the state of Missouri suffered no injury from the debt relief program, many Americans with student debt burdens have suffered because this Court feels free to ignore the plain text of statutes if it leads to policy outcomes it disagrees with.