The Supreme Court won’t stop the debt relief program at the moment

Preserving the Right to Choice in America Against Insurrectionists and Would-Be Patriots: The Case of President Biden

President Biden recently called on Americans to fight back against an assault on democracy that is being waged by insurrectionists and would-be patriots, as part of a speech at Independence Hall. “We are not powerless in the face of these threats,” he insisted. We aren’t bystanders.

During these times, the people need the Supreme Court to be the umpires calling balls and strikes to ensure a fair playing field for all. Instead, the court’s right-wingers are calling balls for one team and strikes for the other.

As Justice Elena Kagan said in a talk this month at Northwestern University School of Law, “When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as trying just to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem — and that’s when there ought to be a problem.”

The majority of the people have gone against them because they are despised, and now they have the votes to dump them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”

The program Biden has announced would benefit people with student loan debt, but those who never graduated or went to predatory institutions that are currently being hurt the worst would see the greatest benefit, since they would have a chunk of debt knocked off.

Moore said that the right to choose affects him and his family as well as people he cares about.

The case will be seen as a victory for the Biden administration. Democrats want to forgive your student loans, while Republicans are going to stop them at the Supreme Court.

Shannon Thomas, Moore’s girlfriend said the climate in the country scares her. She has federal student loan debt as well and expects that the executive action of Biden could eliminate years of payments for her.

She worried about her patients and worried about the future of her job if the right to choice wasn’t protected in this state.

“It’s not to say that other issues are not important,” said Dakota Hall, the executive director of Alliance for Youth Action, “but when you have had a constitutionally protected right for so many decades taken away, that impacts so many people in this country, that it has to be number one priority.”

He added that that doesn’t mean that organizers don’t care about passing environmental legislation or student loan debt or about the economy more broadly, but “we know right now what’s on the line in this moment.”

But other advocates say student debt is on that line too, with some advocating that the White House move to eliminate all federal student debt or at least cancel $50,000.

“I think we’re going to give you money before the election so you can vote, so you’ll go out and vote.” ” I think we still need more, I think it’s kind of like that.”

Mitchell is on the NAACP’s youth board. She has federal student loans and says the issue has remained a core priority of the organization – given the sizable impact student debt has on Black borrowers.

Debt cancellation could affect more than just student loans, according to Mitchell.

” The racial wealth gap is influencing a lot of reproductive access, and so if we can close it, we can also influence this other thing and have a domino effect,” Mitchell said.

Young voters want student debt relief and abortion access: What Biden’s executive order tells NPR and how the Supreme Court’s decision may affect their support for Democrats

Santiago Mayer said that both student debt relief and abortion access can be used in the same way. The message: Republicans want to take away your rights.

“It all ties together into this basic message of youth rights and how young people deserve to be able to enjoy their lives in the same sort of way that their parents and grandparents were able to,” he told NPR.

“Both with the rights of personal freedom such as abortion, and also having personal finances that allow them to succeed in life which is now impossible due to the high cost of college and student debt,” he said.

The CEO of Target Smart, a Democratic-leaning data firm, says that voter registration has increased among young women after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

Bonier toldNPR that historically voters have been more excited in an oppositional sense, and that the reason for that is to encourage voters to protect something.

Bonier hasn’t seen much boost in voter registration or turnout, but Biden’s executive order on student loans could have an effect on support for the Democratic candidates.

“I think perhaps whereas Dobbs will have the effect of turning out more younger progressive voters to help defend choice. He stated that student debt retirement, the inflation Reduction Act, and persuading younger voters to vote for Democratic candidates may have an impact on those voters.

According to NPR’s polling, Biden’s approval rating among Gen Z voters has been going up over the past few months.

Young voters LOVE @POTUS student debt relief plan. 70% of young voters support the plan and 42% of them say they are more likely to vote because of it.

The latest NPR Marist survey from late September has Biden at 48% approval among younger voters, a five-point bump from late August and a sizable change from just 31% in mid-July.

The Case against the Biden Administration in the Implications of Swine Flu: A First Supreme Court Justice’s Decision and an Appellate Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Last month, the Biden administration began notifying people who are approved for federal student loan relief. More than twenty-six million people applied to the program by the time it was frozen. No debt has been canceled thus far.

A group of Republican-led states said the administration exceeded its authority by using the swine Flu as a pretext to mask the true purpose of their campaign to erase student loan debt.

“Young people like it when the government acts and listens to them,” he said. Young people do not like government doing something and the court taking it away.

Justice Amy ConeyBarrett, who is the Supreme Court justice, turned down an appeal from a group of Wisconsin taxpayers regarding the student loan forgiveness program.

The Brown County Taxpayers Association did not have standing to challenge the lower courts ruling on the issue, which was considered an uphill battle. Taxpayers don’t have a right to complain about how the government uses taxpayer funds.

She has jurisdiction over the lower court that ruled on the case, so she acted alone. She didn’t refer the matter to the full court. Her denial appeared as a single sentence on the court’s docket.

A federal district court judge decided to reject a separate lawsuit brought by the Republican-led states because they had no right to bring it.

The states are going to appeal. That would send the case to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, where it is likely to face a panel of conservative judges.

The Biden administration is facing a number of lawsuits, among them one from the Arizona Attorney General.

A lawsuit against the biden student loan forgiveness program after it was stalled in court by the state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Taxpayers Association

As for the payment obligations, they were set to resume last January, but the president issued an extension due to the fact that his loan forgiveness program was stalled in court.

The program is designed to aid borrowers who are at highest risk of delinquency or default. Up to $10,000 in student loan debt relief could be offered to eligible borrowers if debt cancellation begins.

The bottom line remained the same after a 3 1/2 hour argument. The Biden student loan forgiveness program will likely be struck down unless the court decides that the states do not have standing to argue in court.

For those with less than $100,000 a year, and for those with greater than $250,000 per household, the plan cancels $10,000 in debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last month that it estimated the plan’s price tag at $400 billion, and the Education Department followed a few days later with a similar estimate of $379 billion over the life of the program.

The lawsuit was brought by Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina, but Judge Autrey did not rule on the larger issue. Instead, he said the states had not suffered injuries of the sort that gave them standing to sue.

Justice Amy ConeyBarrett was the one who got the emergency application. It is possible that the court’s other justices agreed with her decision.

The emergency request to the Supreme Court was brought by the Brown County Taxpayers Association, a Wisconsin organization made up of around 100 taxpaying individuals and business owners that advocates for conservative economic policy.

At the heart of the case is the Department of Education’s authority to forgive the loans. Several of the conservative justices have signaled in recent years that agencies – with no direct accountability to the public – have become too powerful, upsetting the separation of powers. They have stopped using the term administrative state.

The plan has been challenged by several other conservative organizations. The lawsuits in lower courts may face similar difficulties in showing a harm that is relevant to the case.

The simple application for student loan forgiveness with the Biden administration: How many people are interested in the process? A study of administrative burdens and applications with Department of Education

The Biden administration unveiled its student loan forgiveness application online a week ago. Twitter lit up with joyful posts about debt relief, as well as about the surprisingly easy process.

Six people negotiated a deal with the health care website on the day that it launched in the fall of 2013, but eight million people applied for the website in the first weekend it was open. As professors of public policy, we have shared our research on administrative burdens making vital public services harder to access with the Biden administration, and we spoke with Department of Education officials about how many people might participate in the program. Even so, it was astonishing for us to see just how simple it is to apply for debt relief.

The streamlined application shows what can be done when government focuses its attention on the public in delivery of public services. The form can be completed in just a couple of minutes. It works on both a computer and a smartphone, and it is available in Spanish and English. It’s three simple pages: a welcome page, a form and a confirmation page on which applicants attest that they are eligible. Beneficiaries do not have to set up an account with a password in order to use it, which is a small step that could discourage people from starting. Five pieces of information are required for applicants: name, social security number, birthdate, phone number and email address. That’s it.

The case of Pittman: What does the Fifth Circuit say about the U.S. judiciary’s role in our system of government?

But for Pittman, the central problem with the program is that its sheer economic size required clearer authorization from Congress than that provided by the 2003 statute on which the executive branch is relying. The program would be impossible to save without Congress getting involved if the ruling is left intact.

The US court of appeals for the Fifth Circuit will likely be the place where the Biden administration will take the case, in order to get the case before the Supreme Court. It is not likely that he has the last word. It is worth taking a step back and thinking about the lengths to which it took to find standing in a context in which every other court has held it does not exist.

In a nutshell, a case’s standing has three elements: That the plaintiff shows an “injury in fact”; that the injury is “fairly traceable” to the defendant’s allegedly wrongful conduct; and that the courts are able to provide at least some redress for their injuries.

Although standing is a technical doctrine, it’s also an important one. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a 2007 opinion, “No principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government.”

Basically, the idea is that it’s not the federal courts’ job to answer hypothetical questions or resolve policy disputes. Only if a party can show how they’ve been harmed by the challenged policy in a manner that is concrete and particularized – real and discrete – will they (usually) be allowed to challenge it.

If the complaint is just that the government is acting unlawfully in a way that doesn’t affect plaintiffs personally, that’s a matter to be resolved through the political process – not a judicial one. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it 30 years ago, “vindicating the public interest (including the public interest in Government observance of the Constitution and laws) is the function of Congress and the Chief Executive.”

A Supreme Court Justice’s Benchmark on a Biden-Bisn Program for the Student Loan Assistance Program: A Generalized Grievance

Indeed, the six states that are challenging the Biden plan have thrown everything at the wall to make such a showing. The two individuals wouldn’t be able to get loan forgiveness under the Biden plan. The one argument that Adler thinks likely may hold water is Missouri’s claim that the Biden plan could end up depriving the state of revenue from the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, known as MOHELA.

Instead, objections to the Biden program present the classic kind of “generalized grievance” that the Supreme Court has long held federal courts lack the constitutional authority to resolve – like when a taxpayer tried to sue the CIA in an attempt to force the agency to provide a public accounting of its (allegedly unlawful) expenditures.

For if Justice Alito was right that “no principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government” than the idea that courts can only decide cases that present actual, justiciable controversies between adverse parties, then that principle ought to prevail even against the most strenuous (if not well-taken) objections to the government policy being challenged. Otherwise, the courts aren’t acting as courts; they’re just taking sides in policy debates that no one elected them to resolve.

As other challenges to the student loan program percolated, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to step in and allow the program to go into effect pending appeal.

Two borrowers who are not qualified for full debt relief forgiveness and who did not get a chance to comment on the Education Secretary’s decision to provide targeted student loan relief to some brought the challenge.

The justices decided to hear a different case this term, regarding a group of states. The court did not say whether it would ultimately consolidate the two cases.

The program has already been frozen while legal challenges play out as a result of the court’s action. The new people add to the mix.

Biden’s program would offer up to $20,000 of debt relief to millions of qualified borrowers, but it has been met with legal challenges since it was announced.

The justices were urged to lift the block on the program and hear oral arguments by the Solicitor General. They agreed only to the latter request.

Lower courts have entered nationwide orders blocking the Secretary of Education from using his authority to give relief to student-loan borrowers impacted by the Covid-19 flu, Prelogar argued in court papers.

The College Board: How Conservative were the Justices on Student Loan Debt? A Study of a Students’ View of Debt Relief in Higher Education and Higher Education

Pointing it out is sometimes effective. The most striking feature of all this liberal dissent, though, is how fundamentally conservative it is. Liberals can either choose not to dissent and buck up a crisis-ridden institution, or they can do so. So is owning conservatives by suggesting that their interpretive methods could serve liberal ends if there were more liberal votes.

The Republican talking point on this case is that Biden used Covid to push through a policy Congress would have never approved, and that the plan is a massive taxpayer handout. Why doesn’t Congress act to relieve student loan debt, even if it means making the wealthy and large corporations pay more in taxes and improving the economic and personal futures of many young people?

Some justices have been paid handsomely through lucrative book deals or teaching jobs, which provide limited information about their finances, those of their spouses and various reimbursements for travel. Among that group is Sotomayor, Gorsuch and Barrett, who have all received over six figures in book royalties or publishing deals in recent years.

The court is also comprised of some of the nation’s brightest legal minds from a small number of prestigious schools, yet another factor that underscores their distance from the borrowers who could benefit from the debt relief assistance. The majority of its current members attended one of the Ivy League law schools.

Some of the justices received financial assistance to attend school. Thomas received a scholarship from Holy Cross College to pay for his undergraduate degree there, while Sotomayor attended Princeton University and Yale Law School on scholarships. They’re from different areas with different politics. Thomas was the leading conservative justice on the court and was born in poverty in Georgia.

Some students who had federal loans for undergraduate programs at private schools could be eligible for the relief. In fact, those students took out more debt than their public school counterparts in recent years and at slightly higher rates, according to data from the College Board.

“I think it’s fair to say that (the justices) didn’t live the experiences of the people that benefit from the president’s debt relief program. And it’s important for them to go into this case understanding the limits of their own life experience and how that might affect their ability to be impartial considering case,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, which urged the justices to uphold the relief program in a friend-of-the-court brief.

Pierce is looking to ask questions of Sotomayor and Jackson to show the people who will benefit from the economic rationale that was used in the case.

Barred Student Loan Forgiveness During a National Emergency: The Case of 2020-2020 Student Loans and the Biden Administration v. Brown

The program is challenged by Republican-led states and conservatives who say it amounts to an unfair attempt to eliminate a huge amount of student loan debt.

In 2021, for instance, the court invalidated the Biden administration’s Covid-19-related eviction moratorium issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention holding that such a program needs to be specifically authorized by Congress. In 2022, the court blocked a nationwide vaccine or testing mandate for large businesses, sending a clear message that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had overstepped its authority.

Tuesday’s cases will also highlight an important threshold question that could block the court from reaching the merits of the dispute: whether the parties behind the challenge have the legal right, or “standing,” necessary to bring suit.

A pandemic is clearly a national emergency, a position former President Donald Trump also took when he paused student debt payments in 2020. Biden expanded upon that, putting loans back into repayment starting in July, but also putting forward a plan to forgive rather than just pause at least some debt.

In June of last year, supporters of the doctrine were given a boost after the Supreme Court stated that it curbed the ability of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants.

The second case is called Department of Education v. Brown, and it was brought by two individuals who did not qualify for the full benefits of the forgiveness program, and argue the government failed to follow proper rulemaking when putting it in place.

After the litigation over the loan forgiveness Program is resolved, the payment pauses will last for 60 days. If the program has not been implemented and the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payment will resume 60 days after that, according to the government.

At the Supreme Court, the Biden administration argues that the secretary of education had the clear authority to provide the relief to borrowers making less than $125,000 per year ($250,000 for households) in 2020 or 2021 in order to protect them from financial harms brought on by the pandemic such as the inability to buy food or make rent or mortgage payments.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, replied that Congress had acted when it passed the 2003 law creating special provisions for student loan forgiveness during a declared national emergency.

The Justice was interested in the impact debt forgiveness could have on millions of people. They didn’t have the same support lines that other people did.

An Attorney General’s Brief Brief on the HEROES Act and Biden’s Plan to End the Student Loan Debt Crisis in the State of Missouri

“This is not a case where the agency relied on statutory language that is vague, cryptic, ancillary, or modest,” she said, noting that the grant of authority is “central” to the HEROES ACT.

She said that neither the states nor the two individuals behind the challenges have the standing to file a suit. She warned that if the justices held otherwise, it could have profound implications for the future.

“Virtually all federal actions – from prosecuting crime to imposing taxes to managing property – have some incidental effects on state finances,” she said.

As for the states, Nebraska Attorney General Michael T. Hilgers, who is also representing Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina, stressed that the Biden administration exceeded its authority by using the pandemic as a pretext to mask the true goal of fulfilling a campaign promise to erase student-loan debt.

Hilgers didn’t agree with the government that states can’t show harm to get into court. In court papers he put forward multiple theories of standing that mostly revolve around the theory that the states will lose tax revenue.

Critics of that theory say that Mohela was established with financial and legal independence from the state of Missouri and the vast amount of its funds are segregated from state funds. They believe that for the purpose of the lawsuit, Mohela cannot be considered an “arm of the state.”

There is a group of former government officials who believe that Biden should not be allowed to forgive billions of dollars in student loan debt because they are owed by 43 million borrowers.

While the Biden administration is aggressively defending the program in court, the president did not announce the program until August 2022, and then only under pressure from the left wing of his own party.

The Biden plan is on hold because two lower courts put it on hold, and now the case is going to the Supreme Court. The justices will hear the expedited arguments on Tuesday in the challenge to Biden’s plan.

The case was informally consulted with the White House by a University of Texas law professor. The words of the statute have clear meaning according to him.

Congress gave the education secretary broad authority, and that is what this grant of authority is for. The text of the statute talks about the power of the secretary to waive or modify statutory provisions applicable to programs like federal student aid.

But Case Western University law professor Jonathan Adler says waiving or modifying loan requirements is not the same thing as canceling the obligation to pay back some or all of a loan.

“It’s certainly fair to claim that the court is putting a thumb on the scale in the way that statutory language like this is being interpreted,” Adler says, adding that the court, when in doubt, assumes Congress didn’t give any agency the power. The Department of Education has already lost if we have to argue about the statute, he says.

Whichever way the court rules, its decision will have huge practical effects for millions of people with outstanding federal student loans, particularly borrowers who have lower incomes.

If the justices determine that states don’t have the right to file lawsuits because they don’t have enough proof, then it could have an even greater impact.

It is possible that the Supreme Court would like to see less of these lawsuits. It would have to limit the doctrine of legal standing in order to do that.

That’s just speculative, so Professor Vladeck thinks it won’t fly. He points to what the Supreme Court has said for a decade — that a “future injury can’t be the basis to sue unless it is, in the words of Justice Samuel Alito, ‘certainly impending.'”

Also likely to come up at Tuesday’s argument is the timing for student loan forgiveness. The premise of the loan program is that younger people with loans have suffered economically, and need some relief from their loans. But Biden has announced that the pandemic emergency will end May 11. The administration claims that the “downstream effects” of the pandemic will nonetheless continue for quite some time after the end of the emergency. That argument could be very hard to support at the Supreme Court.

The legal questions surrounding the program were raised during the hearing, and they made clear that the conservatives would have to consider those issues if they rule in favor of the program.

In the questions the conservative justices posed, they signaled that they see the GOP states’ case as presenting the court with another chance to draw the lines around when the executive branch can and cannot act without Congress.

Several of the exchanges concerned the application of the so-called “Major Questions Doctrine,” a legal theory embraced by the court’s Republican appointees that says Congress can be expected to speak with specificity when it gives an agency power to do something of great political or economic significance.

Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out during arguments that something that’s going to affect so many people and cost so much money should, to the casual observer, come from Congress.

When it comes to emergency powers, some of the most significant mistakes in the court’s history were related to the assertion of executive or emergency power, while some of the best moments in the court’s history were against presidential assertions of emergency power.

Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell, representing all six GOP states, replied that it was “a question of state politics” but argued that as a matter of law, “the state has the authority to assert its interest.”

The Secretary of Education has many years of experience in educational affairs. “But … in terms of macroeconomic policy, do we normally assume that every secretary Cabinet member – as learned as they are – has that kind of knowledge?”

The question suggested Gorsuch’s skepticism to the idea that Congress would have given the secretary of education the power – without more explicit language in the statutory – to do the sort of mass student debt cancellation that could affect the larger economy.

The Standing Arguments of the Missouri Supreme Court and the Case of the MOHELA-Kagan Suspensions After the First Preliminary Adjunction

Justice Kagan said that it was set up as an independent corporate entity with the ability to bring suits of its own. Even if the harm is great, we usually don’t allow one person to step into another’s shoes and say, “I think that person has suffered a harm.”

The state had to file an open-records request in order to get the records it needed from the lawsuit, as the state was so disconnected from MOHELA.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also pressed Campbell on whether the supposed harms the loan forgiveness program would cause MOHELA had really established standing for Missouri.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has stood out among the conservatives for asking particularly pointed questions of the GOP states about their standing arguments, setting her apart as a potential pickup vote for the court’s three liberal members.

“If MOHELA is an arm of the state, why didn’t you just strong-arm MOHELA and say you’ve got to pursue this suit,” Barrett asked Campbell, among several questions she asked him about the states’ standing claims.

Even if Barrett swings to the liberals to vote that the lawsuit should be rejected because of the standing concerns, the Biden administration will need the vote of one more GOP-appointed justice.

She explained that they do not have friends or families who can help them make the payments. She said that people won’t suffer as much because of the Pandemic.

The secretary of education has been dealing with educational issues and the problems surrounding student loans, and judges will now be given the right to decide how much aid to give to students, she said.

Some court members leaned into the individual plaintiffss claims that they were unfairly deprived of a notice and comment period to argue that the program was unfair to them.

Alito asked why the people who didn’t get the same relief were not treated the way that other people were.

Prelogar said Congress had made a decision that when there is a national emergency, the secretary can provide relief.

Debt, Precarity, and the Social Issues: Student Benefits vs. College Costs in the Era of the 2022 Midterm Election

That line of questioning also received pushback from some of the court’s liberal members, including Sotomayor, who said at one point that there is an “inherent unfairness in society because we’re not a society of unlimited resources.”

“I think the bottom-line answer to be, everybody suffered in the pandemic. Different people got benefits because they qualified for different programs. Sotomayor said.

Jackson told Prelogar that he was wondering if the same fairness issue would arise with respect to any federal benefit programs.

Conservative Supreme Court justices took a dim view of President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for some borrowers.

Those are valid questions, and the idea of debt forgiveness splits the country in half. In national exit polling conducted for the 2022 midterm election, 50% of midterm voters, mostly Democrats, approved of Biden’s debt relief plan, and 47%, mostly Republicans, opposed it.

Battling student debt and being unable to pay it is just one of the reasons why so many Americans live in a state of precarity. Millennials, the oldest of whom are now in our 40s, have been notoriously reluctant to have children, late to marry, and unable to save for homes. Student debt isn’t the only driver of these shifts – much of it is cultural as much as economic – but beginning your adult life owing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars does not exactly create a stable foundation on which to build a life.

These students – those who are indebted but don’t have a diploma – are typically vulnerable in many other ways. First-generation college students, black or Hispanic students, and students with never completed their degree are more likely to default on their loans than students with a for-profit school degree.

Biden’s proposal would be a step in the right direction but is not complete and doesn’t address the problem of college costs, which is the root problem.

Supreme Court Student Loans forgiveness What Matters: When We Learn How to Get Along, What We Don’t Know

These are people from every part of the country, a point the White House tried to make when it released a list of applicants by congressional district.

“And if they haven’t acted on it, then maybe that’s a good lesson to say for the president or the administrative bureaucracy that it’s not something they should undertake on their own,” Roberts said.

The administration points to 9/11-era legislation they say allows the secretary of education to take great power during a national emergency, in this case the pandemic. But justices have recently been skeptical of Covid-related emergency arguments.

“Right now, I have taken out a lot of loans. He said he was trying to go through college without having to worry about all the payments.

Glen Lopez, a freshman at Morgan State, described his student debt as a “creeping feeling.” He said that he doesn’t think about the debt for long.

“Well, what I was sharing is a story that is certainly no anomaly. This is a huge crisis and it is burning people from every walk of life.

I had to take out those loans because I was growing up in a single- parent household and it was hard to make ends meet. I ultimately defaulted on those loans and I did pay off those loans, but it took me 20 plus years to do so. I was fully employed and often living check to check. and I simply could just not make ends meet. She said she just couldn’t get ahead.

“And despite people’s Herculean efforts working multiple jobs, given rising costs, people are treading water. She said that they could do something to alleviate the burden and hardship.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/supreme-court-student-loan-forgiveness-what-matters/index.html

Vladeck Tells Them Not the Judges: Why the U.S. Supreme Court Should NOT Eraize Standing for the Six Red States

CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan that if the Supreme Court grants standing to the six red states, it has the potential to open up a new era of legal challenges in which states overload the legal system with challenges to any and all presidential actions.

“Does their hostility to this program lead them to really weaken the historical limits on standing?” The issues justices will have to decide is whether or not this is a political issue to be decided at the ballot box.

The author is a journalist based in New York, and his book is called “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on social networking websites. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The US government was founded to have separate powers for the president and for the legislature, and to avoid executive action.

High-Cost Student Loans in the U.S., as Described by a High-Judicial-Court Justice

This is a case that may fall apart before the judges even get to the real meat of it, thanks to standing issues with the plaintiffs. In order for a court to hear a case like this one, the individuals or entities suing have to have suffered some actual harm – they can’t just dislike a law or policy, they have to be negatively affected by it. The Court will first have to consider if the Republican governors who are suing have met the threshold to sue in the first place.

If the Republican governors win, they’ll kill the student loan forgiveness program, and the real loser will be indebted former students.

Student loan debt has exploded in the last few decades. According to the Education Data Initiative, while the average borrower takes out $30,000 in loans to pay for a bachelor’s degree, the average federal debt owed is more than $37,500, and the average private student loan debt is a whopping $54,921.

To add insult to injury, an 18-year-old who spent four years racking up credit card debt buying luxury cars, wearing designer clothes and going on exotic vacations can discharge that debt in bankruptcy. The only way to pay for school for an 18-year-old is to take out a $100,000 loan at 7.5% interest.

Student loan systems place heavy burdens on young people as they embark on their adult lives, as well as overreach from a conservative Supreme Court, which we should be concerned about.

Estimates of the plan’s cost have ranged from $300 billion to $430 billion, but on Tuesday at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts went high. He said that it is half a trillion dollars in debt and 43 million borrowers. If you’re going to “give up” that much money and “affect the obligations of that many Americans on a subject that’s of great controversy, they would think that’s something for Congress to act on,” he added.

Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas are Conservative Justices. Barrett countered that a provision that gives the education secretary the power to waive and modify the terms of federal student loans is not the same thing as erasing all or part of those loans, wiping the debt off the books.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson added that the court should “be concerned about jumping into the political fray unless we are prompted to do so by a lawsuit that is brought by someone who has an actual interest.”