The U.S. Constitution is a Rule of Law: Biden’s Call for Action against the Affirmative Attack on Democracy

In a recent speech at Independence Hall, President Biden called on Americans to stand against an assault on democracy — the ongoing assault waged by insurrectionists and would-be patriots, by election deniers and other extremists. He insisted that we are not powerless in the face of threats. “We are not bystanders.”

They invoked the spirit of Justice Antonin Scalia when they questioned the majority view that abortion rights weren’t going to be put on the chopping block. The liberals didn’t attack judicial power that was developed by him. At stake in one case, he remarked in dissent, was “the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law.” Nor was he above issuing warnings when he thought the problem was the other side’s self-aggrandizement at the expense of self-rule. “I write,” he began another incendiary dissent, “to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.” Justice Scalia’s hypocrisy was that he made such claims selectively. But today’s liberals do not make them at all.

While the court is sworn to protect the Constitution and the American people, it unmoors itself from those responsibilities in the process. This could not be happening at a worse moment. Election deniers in the Republican Party are undermining the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is a present and growing threat.

The majority overruled it’s own decisions because it hates them and now has the votes to throw them out. There is a rule by judges for the rule of law.

Student Loans and Abortion: The Impact of Biden’s Plan and the U.S. Supreme Court on Women’s Rights

Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, first announced in August, aims to deliver debt relief to millions of borrowers before federal student loan payments resume in January after a nearly three-year, pandemic-related pause.

“I went into school expecting to never pay my student loan debt, but the right of women to make their own choices directly affects me and my family and people that I care about.”

The Supreme Court’s decision last June to overturn Wade and allow abortion in the states is an issue that is likely to figure into this election, as Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness plan has majority support among younger voters.

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

“I worry about my patients and I worry about my job and what the future of my job looks like if we don’t get protection for women’s right to choose in this state,” she added.

Dakota Hall, the executive director of Alliance for Youth Action said that other issues are important, but when you have had a constitutionally protected right for so long taken away, that impacts so many people in this country.

He said that organizers still care about passing legislation about the environment or student loan debt, but they know what’s at stake right now.

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 $10,000 is kind of like a – we’re going to give this to you before midterms, so you turn out to vote. But I think it’s kind of like we still need more,” Kyra Mitchell, 23, told NPR.

Mitchell, who votes in Michigan, is a youth board member with the NAACP. She said the issue has remained a top priority for the organization due to the impact student debt has on Black borrowers.

Mitchell supports abortion access and protects voting rights but says debt cancellation can be more than just student loans.

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

The Rise of Student Debt Relief and Abortion Access in the United States after Dobbs: A Voice for Young Voters of Tomorrow

Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow, says both student debt relief and abortion access are issues that can have similar messaging. 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.

He said that being able to have personal finances of their own that are able to help them succeed in life is now impossible because of the cost of college and student debt.

I’ve been following the story of how young women are seeing huge spikes in engagement post-Dobbs. This chart shows the states where young women have seen the largest increase in share of new registrants since Dobbs. That’s a pic.

Bonier told NPR that voters are usually motivated to protect something and that the opposition tends to organize voters.

It doesn’t seem to have changed voter registration or turnout by much, but it could make a difference in the outcome of the election, as Biden’s executive order on student loans could help Democratic candidates.

“I think perhaps whereas Dobbs will have the effect of turning out more younger progressive voters to help defend choice. Perhaps student debt retirement, things like the inflation Reduction Act, and persuading young voters to vote for Democratic candidates and seeing them as representing their interests more, could have an impact on young voters.

Biden’s approval rating has risen in recent months among younger voters, according toNPR’s polling.

Young voters LOVE @POTUS student debt relief plan. A survey shows that young voters who support the plan are more likely to vote for Democrats.

A recent survey from late September shows Biden has an approval rating of 52% among younger voters, up five points from August and a big jump from the 31% approval rating he had in July.

A Federal Circuit Judge Elected to Overturn the Biden Administration’s Student Loan Forgiveness Case against a Republican-Focused State

Last month, the Biden administration began notifying people who are approved for federal student loan relief. The government stopped taking applications after 26 million people had already applied to the program. Debt has not been canceled yet.

The challenge brought by six GOP states was thrown out by a federal district court in Missouri after the Supreme Court’s action.

“Young people like it when the government acts and listens to them,” he said. “And if there’s one thing young people do not like, it’s the government doing something and then the court taking it away.”

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a challenge to the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program on Thursday, declining to take up an appeal brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group.

Lower courts had ruled against the Brown County Taxpayers Association in the case, so the appeal was considered an uphill battle. Under normal circumstances, taxpayers don’t have a general right to sue the government over how it uses taxpayer funds.

She had authority to rule over the lower court that ruled on the case. She did not want the matter to go to the full court. Her denial appeared as a single sentence on the court’s docket.

A federal district court judge rejected a separate lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states Thursday, also because the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.

The states are expected to immediately 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 also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and conservative groups such as the Job Creators Network Foundation and the Cato Institute.

There are other aspects of the situation that are harder to understand. Student loan forgiveness is subject to intense political disagreement and multiple lawsuits. The federal appeals court halted the discharge of debt on Friday. It was clear from the beginning that the Biden Administration would like borrowers to apply. “The order does not reverse the trial court’s dismissal of the case or suggest that the case has merit,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said.

If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness.

A federal judge in Missouri and a supreme court justice in Alabama both rejected challenges to the president’s student debt relief programs on Thursday.

The plan cancels $10,000 in debt for those earning less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 per household, and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants for low-income families. 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.

Circuit Court of Appeals for the Administrative State (Case Study) of a Taxpayer’s Supremum Against a Corrupt Executive Order

Judge Autrey, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, did not rule on the larger issue in the lawsuit, which was brought by Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina. He said that the states had not suffered an injury that gave them the power to file a lawsuit.

The person who got the application was Justice Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Presumably 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.

The authority of the Department of Education to forgive loans is at the center of the case. 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 moved to cut back on the so-called administrative state.

The plan has been challenged by several other conservative organizations. Those lawsuits are percolating in various lower courts, though they may face similar difficulty showing a specific harm to stay alive.

The first day of student loan forgiveness: How easy is it to apply for public services? An educator’s perspective on a simple online application for debt relief

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.

Twenty-two million people submitted applications during the first week the website was open, eight million of them over the first weekend, a startling contrast to the six people (not six million, nor 6,000 — just six) who successfully negotiated the Obamacare website on the day of its launch in 2013. We shared our research on how administrative burdens make important public services more difficult to access with the Biden administration, and we talked to Department of Education officials about how many people might be interested in the program, but we weren’t involved in the design of it. It was incredible to see that applying for debt relief is very easy.

A streamlined application shows what can be achieved if government is more focused on the public in delivery of public services. The form only takes a few minutes to complete. It works on both a computer and a smartphone, and it is available in Spanish and English. There are three pages, and they are all simple: a welcome page, a form, and a confirmation page. Beneficiaries don’t have to create an account with a password, which can deter people from starting. Applicants need five pieces of information: name, social security number, date of birth, phone number and email address. That’s it.

Why did the Biden Initiative come to an end? The problem that the Supreme Court hasn’t been heard by the judiciary for some 5th Circuit cases

The initiative came under immediate attack. The major questions doctrine was the reason for the district court blocking the program. Under the doctrine, federal agencies cannot regulate matters of “vast economic and political significance” without clear authorization from Congress.

The Biden administration has already announced its intent to appeal Pittman’s ruling to the ultra-conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and it’s likely that whoever loses there will take the matter to the Supreme Court. It’s unlikely that Pittman will have the last word. But it’s still worth taking a step back and reflecting on the lengths to which Pittman went to find standing in a context in which every other court to date has held it doesn’t exist.

There are three elements that make a case standing: That the injury is likely to be connected to the wrongful conduct of the defendants, that the courts can provide at least some compensation, and that the injury is not just an isolated incident.

Although standing is a technical doctrine, it is also an important one. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that no principle was more fundamental to the judiciarys proper role in our system of government.

It is not the job of the federal courts to resolve policy disputes or answer hypothetical questions. Unless a party can demonstrate how they have been harmed by the policy in a way that is concrete and specific, they won’t 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. Congress and the Chief Executive should be praised for their work in ensuring the public interest is observed of the Constitution and laws.

Each court had to dismiss the suit for lack of standing, like the one brought by six red states in the St. Louis district court. The problem was the same, like it or hate it, if the government hands out a benefit to a class of individuals that doesn’t hurt other people.

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.

The liberal justices have come back to this theme again and again. In remarks to the American Constitution Society, Justice Sotomayor urged her audience not to lose “faith in the court system,” expressing hope that the justices could “regain the public’s confidence that we — as a court, as an institution — have not lost our way.”

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday on President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan and several conservative justices appear to doubt the government’s authority to discharge millions of dollars in federal loans.

The Education Secretary decided to provide debt relief to some, but not to all, and the two borrowers who brought the challenge are not qualified to do so.

Landlord Biden and the Covid-19 Flu: A State of the Play in a Debt Relief Explanation for Subsequent Loans

A group of states brought the case to the justice’s attention and they will hear arguments in the case this term. The court did not say whether it would ultimately consolidate the two cases.

The court action Monday did not change the state of play as the program has already been frozen while legal challenges play out. It adds new people 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 should lift a block on the program and listen to oral arguments this term after Elizabeth Prelogar urged her to do so in the case at hand. They only agreed to the last request.

Prelogar argued in court that lower courts had blocked the Secretary of Education’s plan to give relief to student-loan borrowers who were affected by the Covid-19 flu.

The Case of Biden and the College Board: What Did Ivy Judges Tell Us About Student Loan Debt? It’s Fair to Disturb, But Why Does Congress Really Need It?

Pointing out such hypocrisy is fair and even sometimes effective. The most striking feature of all this liberal dissent, though, is how fundamentally conservative it is. liberals should choose not to do other things in dissent if they want to Buck up an institution in crisis. Conservatives should suggest that their interpretive methods can serve liberal ends if there were more liberal votes.

The Republican talking point on the case is that Biden used Covid as an excuse to push through his plan, even though Congress would have never approved it. So it’s worth asking Republican politicians: Why won’t Congress act to relieve student loan debt — even if it means making the uber-wealthy and large corporations pay more in taxes — and improve the economic and personal futures of so many young people?

In addition to their cozy government salaries, some of the justices have been paid handsomely through lucrative book deals or teaching gigs, according to their financial disclosures, which provide limited information about their finances, those of their spouses and various reimbursements for travel. In the last few years Judge, Judge, and Judge have received over six figure in book royalties or publishing deals.

Roberts, along with Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan all attended Harvard Law School. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh went to Yale Law School. The only current justice who is not part of the Ivy club is Amy Coney Barrett, who received her law degree from Notre Dame.

Some justices were given financial assistance to attend school. Holy Cross College provided a scholarship to pay for Thomas’ undergraduate degree while he was at the school. And they have come from different backgrounds with different politics. Thomas, for instance, grew up in poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, and is the court’s leading conservative justice.

And to be sure, students who took out federal loans for undergraduate programs at private schools could be eligible for the relief. The College Board data shows that those students took out more debt than their public school brethren over the last few years.

It is fair to say that the people who benefit from the debt relief program don’t have the experiences of the justices. 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 said he’ll be looking to both Sotomayor and Jackson to pose “questions trying to tee up the experiences of the people that will benefit to help give the solicitor general the opportunity to really lay out the government’s economic rationale – the emergency that it sees and the reason that it took this big action.”

The EPA’s Clean Energy Policy Act and the Biden-Binding Student Loan Debt: A Case Study of the 2020 Pandemic

The program is being challenged by a group of states and conservatives who argue that it amounts to an attempt to wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of federal student loan debt.

The court invalidated the eviction moratorium issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because it had not been specifically authorized by Congress. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine mandate for large businesses was stopped by the court in 2022, due to the fact that it had overstepped its authority.

The cases on Tuesday will highlight whether the parties in the dispute have legal standing, an important threshold question that could stop the court from reaching the merits of the dispute.

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, the Supreme Court gave more credence to the doctrine by stating in a 6-3 decision that the EPA had no authority to regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants.

The justices declined to do so, but they agreed to hear two cases on an expedited basis. The first dispute, Biden v. Nebraska, pits the administration against a group of Republican-led states. The Department of Education v. Brown was brought by two individuals who didn’t qualify for the program, but argued that the government failed to follow proper procedures when putting it in place.

Appeals to the Attorney General for the Office of Justice for the HEROES Act During the Biden-Biden Pandemic

As things stand, the payment pause will last until 60 days after the litigation over the loan forgiveness program is resolved. 60 days after the program has been implemented, the government will stop paying if litigation is not resolved by June 30.

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.

But Congress also gave us the HEROES Act, which explicitly gives the president the authority to cancel student debt in the case of a national emergency. The pandemic was clearly a national emergency. Justice Elena Kagan said that there are a lot of “really confusing” statutes that come before the Court. Clearly, Congress intended for the president to have the power to waive student debt in a national emergency; can it really be the case that the president was given that power, but he’s not permitted to use it without Congress weighing in?

The borrowers were also looked at by Justice. “They don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments,” she said, adding that many of them will have to default, worsening their financial situation. “Once you default, the hardship on you is exponentially greater. You are going to pay higher prices because you don’t have credit. They are going to continue to suffer from this pandemic in a way that the general population doesn’t.”

A federal court challenge to the Biden administration and the Missouri Department of Education claiming that student loan debt is due to the swine flue

“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.

In another sign of her skepticism toward the states’ standing arguments, she also asked whether the state of Missouri also filed a lawsuit to vindicate the interests of the city of St. Louis.

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

Nebraska Attorney General Michael T. Hilgers said that the Biden administration overstepped its bounds by using the swine flue as a ruse to hide their true goal of destroying student loan debt.

Hilgers rejected the government’s contention that the states can’t show the harm necessary to get into court. He put forward multiple theories of standing based on the theory that the states will lose tax revenue.

A federal appeals court focused on one of the states behind the challenge, Missouri, and pointed to a state created entity called Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) that has contracted with the federal Department of Education to service student loans. The court said that since the new plan won’t allow for servicing fees to be paid, Mohela won’t be able to fulfill its obligation to contribute money to the treasury.

A group of former government officials, including ex- Trump Attorney General William Barr, former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and others, support the red states in asking Biden not to forgive student loan debt.

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, however, has not yet paid out any money because two lower courts have put the program on hold, sending the case to the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the justices will hear expedited arguments in a challenge to the Biden plan brought by six states — Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas and South Carolina.

Stephen Vladeck said that he consulted with the White House on the case. The statute’s words are clear and expansive, according to him.

“This is a stunningly broad grant of authority from Congress to the secretary of education,” Vladeck says. The plain text of the statute is “not vague when it talks about the secretary’s power to waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to programs like federal student aid.”

Adler says that waiving or modifying the loan requirements isn’t the same as canceling the obligation to pay back the loan.

Adler says that it’s reasonable to argue that the court is putting a thumb on the scale when interpreting statutory language like this. The Department of Education has already lost if we argue about the statute instead of the other way around,” he says.

Depending on the outcome of the arguments, millions of eligible student loan borrowers could see their debt canceled. The justices rule will affect when federal student loans can be made again after a nearly three-year pause due to the swine flu.

That said, the case could have an even greater impact if the justices decide that the states don’t have the right to sue at all because they can’t show they have suffered any concrete harm.

The numbers of these lawsuits is skyrocketing, and it is at least possible that the Supreme Court would like to see fewer of them. To do that, though, they would have to limit the doctrine of legal standing as it has been interpreted lately.

Professor Vladeck thinks that won’t fly because it it purely speculative. The Supreme Court has said that a future injury can’t be the basis of a lawsuit if it’s imminent.

Also likely to come up at Tuesday’s argument is the timing for student loan forgiveness. After all, the premise of the loan program is that younger people with loans, in particular, have suffered economically during the pandemic, and are in desperate need of some loan relief. But Biden has announced that the pandemic emergency will end May 11. The administration claims that after the emergency is over, the effects of the Pandemic will continue for some time. At worst, that argument would find itself in a difficult position at the Supreme Court.

If the conservatives do ultimately rule in favor of the policy’s challengers, the hearing made clear they will have to grapple with the legal questions around why states and individual borrowers should be allowed to sue over the program – questions that emerged as a flash point during the arguments.

The questions posed by the justices suggested that the GOP states case was presenting the court with another chance to draw the lines around when the executive branch can and cannot act without Congress.

The Major Questions Doctrine, a legal theory embraced by the court’s Republican appointees that claims that Congress can speak with specificity when it gives an agency power to do something of great political or economic significance, was the focus of several exchanges.

The doctrine was raised by the Chief Justice as he told the US Solicitor General that the case was serious and important.

“Some of the most important mistakes in the court’s history were when it came to emergency powers, and some of the prettiest moments in the court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power.”

The Nebraska Solicitor General was queried by Justice Neil Gorsuch about the doctrine and what it might mean for the court.

The Secretary of Education has a great deal of experience when it comes to educational affairs. In terms of macroeconomic policy, do we suppose that every secretaryCabinet member 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 Kagan-Campbell lawsuit in the Biden administration and the role of the loan forgiveness program in defending debtors’ rights under MOHELA

“Usually, we don’t allow one person to step into another’s shoes and say, ‘I think that that person suffered harm,’ even if the harm is very great,” Justice Elena Kagan told Campbell. Why is there not a person responsible for deciding whether to bring this suit?

Later on, Kagan pointed out that the state of Missouri was so disconnected from MOHELA that the state had to file an open-records request to get the records from MOHELA that it needed from the lawsuit.

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.

Campbell was questioned about the state’s standing claims and whether he would pursue the case if it were an arm of the state.

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.

“They don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments,” she said. She said that the people who are indebted will suffer in ways other people won’t.

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

Some of the court’s conservative members leaned into the individual plaintiffs’ – two borrowers – claims they were unlawfully deprived of a notice-and-comment period to argue to the agency that the program wasn’t fair to them.

“Why was it fair to the people who didn’t get arguably comparable relief, not maybe that their interests were outweighed by the interests of those who were benefited or they were somehow less deserving of solicitude,” Alito asked.

Prelogar said that in this case, the secretary of education made necessary findings to justify the loan forgiveness. She believes that a wave of default is going to be caused by the lack of relief for debtors. She argued that the Biden plan is a perfect example of a context where the executive should be able to use their emergency powers.

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.”

The bottom-line answer, I think, was everyone suffered in the epidemic. Different people got different benefits because they qualified under different programs, correct? “I’m sure that she said that.”

Jackson asked Prelogar if the same fairness issue would arise with respect to federal benefit programs.

If debt forgiveness helped Democrats over perform, it is up for debate, but it was a key issue for Supreme Court justices who were skeptical of Biden’s authority to do things without congressional approval.

Those are valid questions, and the idea of debt forgiveness splits the country in half. A majority of the people who voted in the midterm election in 2022, more than 50% of them, were mostly Democrats, and approved of Biden’s debt relief plan.

Taking on debt is a good investment since graduates earn more money than non- graduates. People can face debt for a long time. 27% of debt is owed by people 50 and older.

These students who are debt free but don’t have a degree are vulnerable in many ways. If a student has never finished their degree or attended a for-profit school, they’re more likely to default on their loan than a student who has been in college all his or her life.

A program like Biden’s would be a big step, but less complete than a congressionally approved program, and it wouldn’t address the root cause of college costs, which is the high cost of college.

Supreme Court Students Learn What Matters During a Pandemic: An Attorney General Reveals the President’s Denial of Education

The White House tried to convey that the people it released a list of applications for were all from the same part of the country.

Roberts said that the president should not do something on their own if they haven’t acted on it.

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.

I took out a lot of loans. … I’m out here trying to just go through college without having to stress about all the payments and everything else,” Perry said.

Glen Lopez, a freshman at Morgan State, described his student debt as a “creeping feeling.” He said that he thinks about the debt “every two to three days.”

“Well, what I was sharing is a story that is certainly no anomaly. This is a systemic crisis – a nearly $2 trillion crisis burning people from every walk of life,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.

I had no choice but to take out those loans because I was growing up in a single-parent household. 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 employed full time and often living check to check. and I simply could just not make ends meet. She said she could not get ahead.

“And despite people’s Herculean efforts working multiple jobs, given rising costs, people are treading water. They’re treading water, and we can do something to alleviate this burden and this hardship,” she said.

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

The U.S. Supreme Court as a Legal Issue: A Case Study of Red States Overloaded with the Legal System, Commentary on Jill Filipovic

If the Supreme Court grants standing to the six red states, it could lead to a new era of legal challenges where the states overload the legal system, according to a CNN legal analyst.

Does their hostility to the program cause them to weaken historical limits on standing? That’s an issue justices will have to grapple with, according to Vladeck, arguing they could also decide this is a political issue to be decided at the ballot box.

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on social media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are not of hers. CNN has opinions on it.

The US government was created to have separation and balance of powers as a way to avoid executive action, he said.

A Democratic High Court Case in Student Loan Forgiveness: Justice Scales in a High State and the Case of a Grand Unified Bankruptcy

The case may fall apart before the judges get to the real meat of it, because of standing issues with the people in it. 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.

The real loser if the Republican governors win is the student loan forgiveness program, not the GOP.

Student loan debt is crushing, and it has exploded in the last few decades. The average private student loan debt is over $50,000, and the average federal debt is over $37,500, according to the Education Data Initiative.

An 18 year old can get rid of credit card debt by wearing designer clothes and going on exotic vacations, all of which can be done in bankruptcy. An 18-year-old signed a $100,000 loan agreement and couldn’t pay it off because it was the only way to pay for school.

A conservative Supreme Court and studentloan system place heavy financial burdens on young people when they embark on their adult lives, as well as overreach from a conservative Supreme Court.

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 half a trillion dollars in debt and 43 million borrowers were discussed. “If you’re giving up a lot of money and affecting the obligations of a number of Americans, Congress should act on it,” he said.

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney 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.”