Supreme Court Opinion on Student Loan Forgiveness [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court Opinion on Student Loan Forgiveness [pdf]

supremecourt.gov

57 pointsoatmeal1161 comments

So often it seems that people are upset about SCOTUS decisions, especially when it's to strike down an existing law, because they feel that what that struck law was doing was a good thing.

It's not the Court's job to decide what is good policy and bad policy. The Court's job is to decide what's legal within the framework of the Constitution, the country's treaties, and other laws. It's quite possible that SCOTUS is striking down a law that was a really good law, and would have been really good policy. But the Court isn't supposed to be looking at that. They're supposed to be looking at our system of laws, and deciding based on that.

To the extent that good policy is being struck down, you need to look to the Legislators (or in this case, the Executive) who are doing a bad job of fitting the policy into our system of laws. Or if that system of laws is the problem, then work on changing that system.

Don't blame the Court when they're doing their job properly, noting that the rest of the government is violating our laws. These kinds of controls are important in the big picture.

Big stretch to say the court was doing it's job properly here

Go ahead and read the dissent if you think the Court was acting properly here.

The Supreme Court manufacturered a "Major Questions" doctrine that's vague enough to apply to anything, but in practice only to policies that the Republican judge majority has ideological disagreements with. I encourage you to read the court's decision. It's partisanship packaged in ad hoc legal justification.

So are you admitting that the decision we're talking about here is a good one, and just lamenting that it isn't applied in certain other cases? Which are the cases where you believe it should have been applied?

Or are you saying that the Major Questions doctrine is bad, and that so long as some addled brain can come up with the slightest chain of rationale to something in an otherwise-unrelated law, we should always open the floodgates? Because if legislating leads to such danger of misinterpretation, then I think we should all be praying for a whole lot more gridlock so that the Executive (whatever party he/she may be from) gets less rationale to do whatever the heck they want.

>So are you admitting that the decision we're talking about here is a good one

Quote where I'm "admitting" that the decision is good.

To add to this, it frustrates me when people complain about institutions being "undemocratic" and then get upset by the Supreme Court upholding the authority of congress.

I get that they are striking down laws that might be good things. But keep in mind that we are all guilty of picking and choosing our justification when it fits our side.

Although, I was hoping for forgiveness to proceed. The decision is not really the upsetting part (for me). IMO the interpretations of the legal framework and decisions for SCOTUS often quite conveniently align to modern political party lines.

As I've mentioned in another comment, SCOTUS is compromised by political interests despite the facade of impartiality. The legal framework we have is no different than the bible or quran or any other text that has produces religions, political parties or ideologies. There are many interpretations one could make about such texts, but somehow judgement often is split by modern party affiliation. It was kind of cool to think for a while that SCOTUS was just doing their job and above political polarization. I no longer hold faith in that belief.

Obviously the court is somewhat political (as it always has been). But I think modern reporting makes it seem far more that way than it actually is. For example look at Bostock from just a few years ago.

This explanation is always trotted out whenever a decision is unpopular, portraying the court as a neutral arbiter that's just reading the rules back to the public.

The truth is, that hasn't been the court's operating model since at least 1964, when the court decided Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964). In that case, the court decided that since someone could cross state lines to stay at a hotel, that Congress had the right to tell a business who their customers were under the Interstate Commerce clause.

For clarity, the Commerce Clause states that Congress has the right to Regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States

The court is textualist or pragmatist depending on its political leaning. The court is political. The court has no code of ethics, and the mechanism to remove justices for bad behavior is ill-defined in the constitution. In summary, they get to play by their own rules, and pretending otherwise is pure fantasy.

Um, that was a unanimous decision where they indicated that the Commerce Clause extends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to hotels that host travelers from outside a state. Essentially, the Court held the government could prevent the motel from discriminating on the basis of race under the Commerce Clause. Since the motel was positioned near Interstates 75 and 85 and received most of its business from outside Georgia, this showed that it had an impact on interstate commerce, which is all that is needed to justify Congress in exercising the Commerce Clause power. Please explain to me how is that political, given the Civil Rights Act?

It was political because the federal government had not previously had the right to regulate businesses within a state. Only states could do that themselves. But gradually this overreach of the federal government has expanded and now they can essentially regulate anything because it could hypothetically tangentially affect commerce (see Gonzales v Raich). It is clear that the framers did not intend the interstate commerce clause to be used in this way, they intended for states to be able to regulate most things themselves (the so-called “police power”).

I guess since the federal government is allowed to prevent various forms of discrimination, including on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, this so-called overreach makes sense. And I suppose since one particular party wants to discriminate against those people, that makes it political?

The older I get, the more I see States' Rights as a smokescreen that originally protected slavery, and is now used to block civil rights, health care, privacy rights, and environmental protection.

I would say the court has been political since at least Dred Scott and probably more like since John Marshall.

> So often it seems that people are upset about SCOTUS decisions, especially when it's to strike down an existing law

> Don't blame the Court when they're doing their job properly

Part of the problem is that, there isn't a lot of widespread confidence that they are doing their job properly. When they do their job properly, part of that is to strike down bad laws. But the mere fact of them striking down a law doesn't mean that they did their job properly.

There's not a lot of trust in the Supreme Court right now—this Court especially.

That was a stretch of executive authority. From the plain reading of the statute, loan forgiveness and modification was supposed to be for unusual and emergency situations. Payment postponement during the pandemic would probably have survived judicial scrutiny. But broad cancellation was overreach.

My tinfoil hat theory is that the administration is probably relieved right now. The implications of this were wild had it succeeded.

This way they can have their cake and eat it too - they can say they tried and were stymied(!) by a crooked court, meanwhile they are not on the hook for adding half a trillion dollars into an already heavily inflationary economy.

I suspect you are correct.

And frankly, I think Congress should stop trying to dodge responsibility by letting the executive stretch its authority to take care of problems Congress won't.

Every textualist on the supreme court should have read section 2.a.1 and said "yup, that gives the executive branch the ability to do basically anything in regards to student loans during a state of emergency which we were in." Instead they invoked the Major Questions Doctrine which seems like a principle made out of whole cloth specifically for when textualism doesn't work the way they want it to.

> 9 The dissent complains that our application of the major questions doctrine is a “tell” revealing that “ ‘normal’ statutory interpretation cannot sustain [our] decision.” Post, at 23, 30. Not so. As we have explained, the statutory text alone precludes the Secretary’s program. Today’s opinion simply reflects this Court’s familiar practice of providing multiple grounds to support its conclusions. See, e.g., Kucana v. Holder, 558 U. S. 233, 243–252 (2010) (interpreting the text of a federal immigration statute in the first instance, then citing the “presumption favoring judicial review of administrative action” as an additional sufficient basis for the Court’s decision). The fact that multiple grounds support a result is usually regarded as a strength, not a weakness.

I doubt this is useful out of context. It turns out the dissent has something to say about more than just the court's use of the goofy (I think Kagan's phrase was "made up," which is fair enough) major questions doctrine.

If student loan forgiveness is to be done, they should also do something to prevent universities from charging ridiculous prices in the first place. The only reason they started doing so is because they know the government is willing to issue loans to pay for crazy high tuition costs.

If loans are to be forgiven, steps have to be taken to prevent us from reaching this point again, or else history will just repeat itself in the future.

Part of the reason this attempt to forgive student loan forgiveness was pretty far fetched to begin with (among many!) Is that their own Department of Education is still issuing student loans! At much higher interest rates than the ones being forgiven!

Yah. If students loans are so evil that they must all be forgiven, shouldn't we stop the creation of new student loans first?

Plus its not like admission prices will just stay in place with such a massive demand shock.

Compare loan forgiveness vs fixing new loans on how much voting power directly benefits.

High tuition rates are caused by the collapse in state funding for higher education. There is no correlation with loan availability. This has been debunked countless times.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...

Historically, funding was tied to tuition caps. These had to be removed when states cut funding to have balanced budgets.

The source you linked to states that funding has fallen around $1220 per year per student, after adjusting for inflation. But it goes on to state that tuition costs have increased $2708 per year.

So what are universities doing with that extra $1500 per year per student? I agree that schools should be better funded, but ballooning tuition costs are more than just a lack of funding.

(All non-inflation adjusted):

2008 to 2021, 4 year public school tuition $7280 to $9375 = +28.8%

2008 to 2021, state support per full time equivalent student: $6552 to $7896 = +20.5%

It looks like cbpp "debunked" it by picking a year that was particularly favorable to that point of view (2018). Looks to me like the two variables have been trending together just fine as per recent data.

Looks like you debunked it by picking a year particularly favorable to your point of view. There was a temporary influx of funding from the massive COVID relief/stimulus packages.

The article was written in 2019. There was no cherry picking. That was the most recent data available to them.

And yet tuition didn't go down as cbpp would've predicted. We at least agree that we ought to use the most recent data when determining whether something has actually been debunked, correct? They used the most recent data at the time, but it's no longer 2018.

That's not what they predicted. Why would you expect it to go down? It was a one year boost in funding and the states didn't condition the funding on tuition prices.

Universities _will not_ reduce tuition without being forced to do so. Universities _cannot_ reduce tuition without more funding.

Because part of the article's premise is that the high sticker price is dissuading people from enrolling. The cost of running a university net public funding was significantly reduced from 2018 to 2021. When your margin goes up and your demand goes down below capacity, then prices go down due to price equilibrium, since the marginal benefit from enrolling one more student is positive, assuming a student can pick from more than one university. But this didn't happen, which means the prices are being driven by some other force (maybe student loans that can never be discharged through bankruptcy?)

Maximizing revenue frequently involves demand being below capacity. If reducing tuition by 20% increases enrollment by less than 20%, it's revenue-negative. My university was the most expensive public school in my state and still enrolled more students every year while increasing (nominal?) tuition despite not being the flagship or a party school. There is a lot more demand for spots in good schools than there are spots available. Universities aren't socks. Students don't pick one because it's 5% cheaper. They're not nearly as price-sensitive as you'd think.

> They're not nearly as price-sensitive as you'd think.

Not me, no I agree with you here. It's the authors of the article you posted that think that students are price sensitive.

You're completely derailing the conversation. Are you looking at the discussion as a whole and trying to stay on topic or just responding to my last comment and looking for a gotcha?

I believe this report may clear things up. It compares per fte inflation adjusted dollars. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cud/postsecondary...

2010 6310 tuition 5790 federal 10420 state 22520 total (16210 from public funding)

2020 8160 tuition 6010 federal 12020 state 26190 (18030 from public funding)

Now if public funding went down $2000 and tuition went up $2000, that would lend evidence to the idea that collapsed public funding resulted in higher tuition. Yet public funding went up $2000 and tuition went up $2000. And you say this is because market forces don't apply and that the state isn't tying funding to tuition. That may be what you believe, but I don't see how any of this refutes the alternative explanation (that it has to do with student loans not being subject to bankruptcy).

You're cherry picking years again. Funding in 2010 was far lower than 2008. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/styles/report_580_h...

Market forces do apply to colleges. Their customers simply are not price-sensitive.

Universities are not businesses. Tuition is frequently less than the cost of teaching students. The cost of an education has risen independently of how that education is paid for. Removing loans from the equation wouldn't lower prices because prices are set by costs, not by profits. There is a ton of administrative bloat, but universities will always prefer to not fire employees over reducing costs for transient members of their school.

Even if it was true, it would not prove your theory that it has anything to do with student loans not being subject to bankruptcy. Universities do not issue loans. Bankruptcy leaves lenders holding the bag, not universities. You have not given any explanation for your theory of undichargable student loans causing higher prices, you've only attempted to refute my explanation as proof that your theory is the only alternative.

> Even if it was true, it would not prove your theory that it has anything to do with student loans not being subject to bankruptcy. Universities do not issue loans.

This is factually untrue; the better universities do not, private for-profit often-predatory universities do, and those loans are subject to the same bankruptcy provisions as the federal loans issued to students at other schools. These are a part of the landscape that education policy must address.

It is not true for the universities that 95% of students attend. And you've not replied to the several other points I made in my comment.

10 years was the timespan that the government report used.

The reason why it matters whether or not you can discharge the loan is because it changes lending behavior in the first place. The baby boomers used to work entry level jobs over the summer and pay for a semester of college. In the late 70s, congress changed the bankruptcy law.

Lenders loved this because it completely changes the risk equation. It incentivized them to lend as much as possible to as many as possible. This triggered a feedback loop with colleges. They could charge more for tuition, and in turn, lenders could lend more risk free debt. Rinse and repeat. Colleges would use that extra income to take on administrative bloat and wasteful programs. Four decades later, tuition is double that of other countries, colleges are happy, lenders are happy, and graduates are getting crushed by debt.

Price controls never work.

Why is that?

Because the Law of Supply and Demand cannot be repealed. All attempts always result in "unanticipated" deleterious side effects, such as shortages.

A universal truth in economics is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you tax something, you get less of it.

The government uses this to good ends all the time. It's why we have very heavy taxes on gasoline and cigarettes: we want people to burn less gas and to smoke less. And we offer tax rebates for upgrading your house with better windows, and so forth.

Forgiveness of student loans is just a subsidy of student loans. Subsidies give you more of it, which means that the more student loans we subsidize, the more student loans we'll have.

Notice the exact words just above. I didn't say that if we subsidize student loans, we'll necessarily get more education, or that we'll get better educated people - because that's not what's being subsidized here! If we're subsidizing loans, we can expect people to take on more debt! But this doesn't necessarily lead to more actual education being done, because that's not what's being subsidized here.

Of course, that doesn't prove the converse. It doesn't prove that education doesn't increase; just that we have no real reason to expect that it will.

There is a principal of loan forgiveness that is old, nearly universal, and so well-known that it already has its own name: bankruptcy.

At some point in the recent past, at least during my lifetime, this was forbidden. It is one of the few classes of debt where it is forbidden.

I do not know why we would try to force through some weird one-off amnesty, rather than re-implementing bankruptcy for student loan debt which would fix the problem with permanence.

Bankruptcy includes many of the factors that opponents of forgiveness complain about... it's not exactly free. Those who avail themselves of it must make an uncomfortable tradeoff. They're limited in how often they can use it. It invites scrutiny to make certain they aren't using it except when they actually need it. Scrutiny from judges and arbiters who have experience sniffing out such fraud.

In the 3 or 4 years this has made the news in mainstream media, I've not once heard anyone mentioning this, or offering it as an alternative. It's quite bizarre.

If someone takes out a mortgage and goes bankrupt, the lender will get the house. If someone takes out a car loan and goes bankrupt, the lender will get the car.

For loans with no collateral, like credit cards, the lenders use credit scores and other heuristics to determine the likelihood of making their money back, and deny applicants who don’t meet their standards.

I believe the intended effect of making student loans immune to bankruptcy was to make education more accessible by incentivizing lenders to provide loans to subprime borrowers.

I share your belief that (new) student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. I expect that lenders will become more choosy in what students they lend money to, and this reduction in money available to students will in turn incentivize schools for once to start lowering prices.

But that idea means fewer students will be able to receive student loans, and it will be attacked (wrongly) from an egalitarian perspective.

> For loans with no collateral, like credit cards, the lenders use credit scores and other heuristics to determine the likelihood of making their money back, and deny applicants who don’t meet their standards.

But you can still file for bankruptcy.

Why? It's not because "hey, lenders have remedies available"... it's because without bankruptcy, things go to shit really fast.

Like with student loans.

Lenders should be allowed to loan money, and to attempt to profit from it. But society isn't obligated to protect their interests at all costs. And if they don't like that, they can just choose not to loan. Lenders that make bad loans put society in danger (if too many lenders make too many bad loans). Society actually has the right and the proper power to tell them to fuck off.

> I believe the intended effect of making student loans immune to bankruptcy was to make education more accessible

The perverse incentive though was delivering this loan accessibility in such a way as if it were financial aid. Young kids, barely legal adults at that point, didn't know any better. And colleges and universities chase that money (why wouldn't they... the money can only be spent on them) by turning their institutions into resort spas. Any increase in cost that came with that was turned around and passed right back to the students who "paid" for it in tuition and fees, but since "someone else" was doing the actual job of paying for it they weren't cost conscious. Granted, young people aren't usually cost conscious to begin with, but this just made it worse.

And the people "paying for it" just hang that bill back around the college kid's neck with ruinous interest like a boat anchor.

Were the colleges and universities at least decent enough to make sure these kids could get a good job that might make it all worthwhile in the long run? Hell no. Instead, they scream bloody murder about how it's more important that they not be turned into vocational schools, and they're teaching people something far more important than job skills... they're "teaching them how to think". What a load of horseshit. Even the law schools are a joke. Ever look into how they cook those books to make it seem like 80% or more of law school graduates have a job lined up within 12 months after graduating?

All in all, I don't know what the intended effect of this was. Maybe it really was wholesome. But I really wish we had legislators who were smart enough to not resort to the "but we meant well" excuses when it all goes to shit, or better yet wise enough to not fuck things up so badly in the first place.

> I expect that lenders will become more choosy in what students they lend money to,

Isn't that the way it should be though?

If you're not a good investment, why waste $60,000 or more sending you to school for a degree that amounts to little more than bragging rights?

In the meantime, we've spent 30 years training an entire industry (higher education) that they don't have to be careful and control costs. Even if we made things right, they'll go on doing what they've done for decades because they know no other way. So even those who should go to college will get reamed for it unnecessarily. But educators would be screwed too, because suddenly we'd need 1/3 or even 1/5 of what we needed before that reform.

Fucking good intentions. Road to hell, yadda yadda.

> I share your belief that (new) student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Old loans too. Lenders aren't innocent in this. Where were their objections at the time? They could have complained, could have said "don't give us this power, we can't use it without risking abuse". Burn that slice of the financial industry to the fucking ground and let its former employees wander the earth as disgraced panhandlers.

Wonder if they'd weigh in differently on PPP loan forgiveness. I have a feeling we'll be filing a lot of SCOTUS news stories in the next decade or so into the "tragic, but unsurprising" drawer.

EDIT: Yes, bad example, given the replies. The fact that PPP was written into law as a deliberate wealth transfer is what's "tragic, but unsurprising" not what a theoretical SCOTUS opinion on it would be. I'm wrong. I guess if people were smart, they would have taken out a PPP loan to pay off their student loans!

PPP forgiveness was pretty much there in Congress's law wasn't it? Didn't require stretching the bounds of executive authority to do it.

Source: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/PPP%20--%20I...

Even if you grant that student loan forgiveness is a good thing, it is not necessarily the case that the ends justify the means.

Didn't the law that created the PPP program have explicit language to forgive the loans if certain conditions were met?

FWIW, while I completely understand the argument, PPP loans are different animal. For one, they were designed from get to to be a massive giveway, which meant that they had 'forgiveness' clauses built in. Student loans explicitly do not. I am saying this as a 'loser' in this case.

I am not suggesting I should be subsidized ( I will be fine, but I am not sure I am a common scenario ). I am saying that I am annoyed that we are throwing money at a lot, but when there is even a suggestion that not-well-to-do are helped, it is immediately thrown out. But you want to throw money at Ukraine? No problem. Money at farmers? No problem. Money at chips to reshore? No problem. Money at corps to relocate and fake build stuff? No problem.

Remove some of the burden from students? Whoa whoa whoa.

Yes. This is Congress's fault.

My strong guess is that Biden was reluctant to try this route, and may have figured if it worked, great, if it didn't, people would blame the conservatives on the court.

But I blame Congress. They could have included such relief in their legislation.

> Remove some of the burden from students? Whoa whoa whoa.

Yeah, this is a little disappointing...it's an investment in your own people.

I can't really complain. The government is already very generous with grants and scholarships. Student loans gave me access to money I never would have seen otherwise, and with lenient repayment terms.

Loan relief really would help all the people who shot their feet off going to for-profit colleges though; those debts should be relieved-- and the institutions dissolved.

> but when there is even a suggestion that not-well-to-do are helped, it is immediately thrown out.

So the "not-well-to-do" people who would have lost their jobs due to government actions without the PPP loans aren't "not-well-to-do" people? Isn't that precisely one of the reasons why the PPP loans were done, to save the jobs of at least some "not-well-to-do" people?

> Remove some of the burden from students? Whoa whoa whoa.

You mean like putting loans on hold so interest is no longer accruing?

PPP was vacuously legal since it was introduced in… a law.

If a single man can forgive $400 billion in loans with the stroke of a pen, why even have a congress?

Congress gave that single man the authority to do so.

Judging by this ruling, evidently not.

A majority opinion doesn't change reality.

So the loans are going to be forgiven?

No idea how it'll end up playing out.

The reality I was referring to was the reality of Congress having delegated this authority to the Executive Branch. Read the dissent if you haven't.

The dissent doesn't make it reality.

The dissent doesn't need to make it reality.

The delegation of authority happened in 2003. It was broad. The delegated authority had been exercised before.

The current Court is just hell-bent on dismantling the ability of the Executive Branch to regulate based on delegated authority.

> The delegation of authority happened in 2003. It was broad.

It wasn't this broad.

> The delegated authority had been exercised before.

Never this broadly.

The reality is that this was a huge overstep by the administration. The majority is correct.

No. The majority is incorrect. This is a broad overstep of the court's authority. The individuals in question have zero standing and if it was such a broad overstep then the call should be on congress to sue the executive branch and pull back that authority. Not on the judicial branch to make up what they think congress's authority should be.

The reality is that this court is increasingly corrupt and going over their authority. And they should be reigned in.

It really does though, because the Supreme Court is the authority who determines whether or not it was authorized, and it was not.

They did not.

that's what the whole dispute was about! and the SC ruled that Congress had not granted the executive branch that authority. and let's be honest, it was always a bit of a stretch to believe that Biden could do it under that authority.

Congress should get of its butt and do it the right way.

Counterpoint, they did not. The administration was trying to exploit a loophole in an emergency law.

The Administration was availing itself of the broad authority delegated to the Executive Branch by Congress almost 20 years prior.

I would have enjoyed watching Scalia try to come up with a rationale for voting with this majority. He might have even voted with the minority.

To the majority argument, the authority was only so broad. The Postmaster General has broad authority to run the postal service, but that does not mean they can shut down every branch and convert it into a rave.

The department of education was given the authority to grant and alter loans for the purpose of issuing loans. Does that actually mean they have the authority to declare "psych" to Congress and do the opposite? Perhaps, but I lean with the majority here.

In many ways, the difference between 1 and 535 is insignificant.

If nine unelected people in a smoke filled room can create and nullify law at will, why even bother with democracy?

I'm going out on a limb here and saying that these SCOTUS opinions are more transparent than, for example, the 5,000+ page bills passed by Congress that you know could have only been written by teams of lobbyists rather than actual representatives.

It's true that they aren't elected directly but they do have to selected and approved by our elected representatives. And can be impeached. So it's a bit disingenuous to describe it in this way (but then the tone of your comment makes it obvious that's what you were going for).

What is written on paper and what is being done are two totally different things, and we only live in reality. At least one of the justices is bought and paid for, getting gifts you aren't legally allowed to receive as a DMV employee, but because they like the outcome, millions are against any impeachment.

I am not a huge fan of Thomas and I think the gifts should have been reported before (although he was not required to do so). And perhaps he should resign as a result. However that's more of an exception AFAICT

We don't have a Democracy, we have a Constitutional Republic. Besides, I don't recall any national vote on loan forgiveness.

By "national vote", do you mean a ballot referendum or a congressional bill?

I don't want to be "that guy", but the United States isn't and was never meant to be a democracy. But that doesn't mean it's any sort of tyrany either. It's a system of checks and balances promoting deadlock.

You have a limited-time dictator, a room full of law nerds, and a Congress half of which is democratic, and half of which represents "the states".

The dictator can do whatever he wants - unless the law nerds or Congress disagree. Congress can do whatever it wants - if you can get both halves of it to agree - unless the dictator or the law nerds disagree - but 2/3 of Congress overwrites the dictator and 3/4 overwrites the law nerds. The law nerds can't do much by themselves and are mostly a reactive force, which are supposed to uphold laws written by others (and generally do so in practice, but of course, not always).

This is a system which promotes the government not doing much, and not changing much, under the philosophy that most change is bad change and no change is better than bad change - while still allowing some good change to flow through the system.

In a democracy, on the other hand, the populus generally always wants change, so that's what they get.

Keep in mind that Biden sought to get the debt nullification by Executive Order because he did not have the votes in Congress to pass it.

You might want to sit down before I tell you about the give away the Federal Reserve did during the pandemic.

> If a single man can forgive $400 billion in loans with the stroke of a pen, why even have a congress?

I think we can all agree that in the interest of governmental restraint, he should be required to use something heavier than a pen, like a big hammer or crowbar.

> It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. Today, we have concluded that an instrumentality created by Missouri, governed by Missouri, and answerable to Missouri is indeed part of Missouri; that the words “waive or modify” do not mean “completely rewrite”; and that our precedent—old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy. We have employed the traditional tools of judicial decisionmaking in doing so. Reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis—in fact, at least three do.

> We do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country. The judgment of the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. The Government’s application to vacate the Eighth Circuit’s injunction is denied as moot.

This is fair and I think I understand why Roberts wanted to write this, but the notion that the text of Kagan's dissent could move the public's opinion of the court at this moment in time is silly enough that it doesn't need to be discussed in an opinion. The court's problem isn't public "misperception," it's public perception.

While I agree with the overall outcome of this case on congressional authority and moral hazard grounds, I must say I am quite concerned about the court's logic regarding standing in this specific case.

Standing doctrine is stupid anyway. It feels like they invented it purely to get out of having to do some tricky decisions. We should greatly broaden standing far more than it is now.

Major questions doctrine is pretty stupid too given it feels like they invented it purely to get out of situations where textualism goes in the opposite direction that they want to rule.

I think the idea is reasonable but it's true they mainly apply it when it's convenient. If you delegate authority, your agent shouldn't overstep the implicit role you have given them. For example if you hire a plumber to "fix your sink" and then you come back and he's replaced all your pipes and billed you $10,000 then you would be rightly angry that he didn't get approval for that additional work even if he says that it was part of fixing the sink.

I think standing as a whole is a useful rule, but it needs to be disambiguated and more consistently enforced. The Court has always used standing as a convenient excuse to weasle out of difficult subjects.

The point I like to make about student loans:

The USA gets to print a great deal of money and run huge deficits without incurring much inflation (even taking into account the recent inflation event). Why? Dollars are the world's reserve currency. Why? Demand for dollars is high, partially because oil is priced in dollars (petro-dollar recycling). Why? Well Iraq tried to change this, look what happened to them.. you get the idea, it's partially a consequence of history and our huge military helps.

So then it comes down to who gets this extra money. In petro-dollar recycling, much of it goes to defense contractors. I think it's entirely valid to have a discussion on the equitable distribution of this money and arguments that we can not afford loan forgiveness are total BS. The reason the money goes to the rich is because they own congress. It's in their vested interest to keep the price of labor low- one way to do this is to get people deep into dept as soon as possible.

The BRICS countries are trying to change that, and they are gaining some momentum in terms of negotiation using China's Yuan becoming an alternative baseline currency. This will likely shake things up quite a bit. So I don't think it will stay USD in terms of lower economic impact from printing more money.

I think it will get really bad within the next decade or so. We're rapidly approaching a point where we won't be able to print our way out, or cut spending enough to get out of it at all.

What would you expect to see happening, in a developed country that doesn't have the benefit of debt denominated in USD and of control over USD, if they had an even worse debt:GDP ratio than the US does?

I ask because there are a few such countries, and they seem to be doing OK. They shouldn't be, if this is something that'll definitely cause serious problems for the US—right? It should already be "really bad" for those countries, I'd think.

Everything is fine until you realize that the money is just ink on paper, so to speak, with nothing behind it. The strength of the US economy and position in global markets has been what's kept things strong. I don't know that it will hold, and have no idea when banking institutions won't be able to prop up peoples faith in said system anymore.

I'm not sure if I expect market collapse or WW3 to happen first... right now, feels like a crap shoot in either direction.

Student loan forgiveness without ending the broken system that is student loans entirely is an extremely cynical, and in my opinion, evil move. It's just a way to continually buy votes using taxpayer money because the next generation that is indebted will vote for the group that will pay off their loans and give them money.

After listening to the oral arguments , it'll be interesting to see how the court Justified this. In general I agree with the current quartz decisions and personally opposed that forgiveness, but this case seems like it was an uphill battle for those against forgiveness.

Congress appeared to give stupidly Broad powers to the executive in the pandemic Heroes Act. Of course it seems like a stretch to consider someone who got student debt 20 years ago and is making good money a hero of the pandemic deserving relief, but it seemed to be allowed in the order

The margins on the opinion are gigantic. You could fit an entire second column of text into the width of those margins.

They are famous for the required specific printed document style which includes wide margins. When you argue before them you have to physically print everything you mention in full in this specific style. And this is per judge. Steve Letho on his podcast once said that for larger cases, the printing cost goes into hundreds of thousands of dollars which stuck in my memory.

I've been trying to understand the rationale of the court in simpler terms. Is this an adequate understanding of the reasoning:

1. Congress delegates some of its authority to issue/handle student loans to the executive branch via the US dept of education and some legislation passed in the past.

2. As President and leader of the executive branch, Biden wants to utilize the authority granted to him to modify the terms of the loans due to the impact of the COVID 19 national emergency. [0].

3. As part of his loan modifications, he wants to forgive a certain portion of the loans altogether, for which he was sued.

4. The Supreme Court ruled that the modifications of the loan forgiveness were ultimately unconstitutional due to the major questions doctrine, implying that while Congress may have delegated some authority to the executive branch for managing loans, outright forgiveness on such a scale would be considered economically significant, and therefore would be presumed not to be delegated. [1].

Am I missing something?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_v._Nebraska.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

Yes. The Court has decided that "modify" does not mean "cancel entirely".

(I also think it's questionable because we no longer have a "national emergency" anymore but they didn't really have to reach that aspect)

Kagan's dissent says everything that needs to be said.

> That is why the Court is supposed to stick to its business—to decide only cases and controversies (but see supra, at 3–13), and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief. The policy judgments, under our separation of powers, are supposed to come from Congress and the President. But they don’t when the Court refuses to respect the full scope of the delegations that Congress makes to the Executive Branch. When that happens, the Court becomes the arbiter—indeed, the maker—of national policy. See West Virginia, 597 U. S., at ___ (KAGAN, J., dis- senting) (slip op., at 32) (“The Court, rather than Congress, will decide how much regulation is too much”). That is no proper role for a court. And it is a danger to a democratic order.

If Congress wants to give the President the power to forgive student loans, they will surely do so explicitly.

Not what Kagen was saying.

The court is only supposed to decide things when someone has been injured. Who was injured in this case?

The issue here is one of standing. The litigant had no standing, this case shouldn't have been heard by the supreme court. Or the hearing should have literally been "you have no standing".

Now, if congress feels like Joe Biden stepped out of line, THEY could have sued him. That would have been the proper course of action.

Here, the court has issued an advisory opinion, which is not it's role nor power. The court is out of line here.

Missouri would have been injured because repayment of loans would provides them with income, which will now decrease. It seems fairly straightforward.

Kagan* explicitly references the court "[refusing] to respect the full scope of the delegations that Congress makes to the Executive Branch", which is simply not what happened. Congress did not delegate that power to the executive.

It's odd to get something so fundamentally incorrect and go "trust me bro" when it comes to the issue of standing. Apart from anything else, has she never heard the maxim "stick to one lie at a time"?

> The court is only supposed to decide things when someone has been injured. Who was injured in this case?

It’s literally the first point held. "Here, as the Government concedes, the Secretary’s plan would cost MOHELA, a nonprofit government corporation created by Missouri to participate in the student loan market, an estimated $44 million a year in fees".

Actually, MOHELA specifically said it was not harmed by the loan forgiveness and wanted nothing to do with the case. This is why many are baffled by the Court's decision to ignore Standing.

MOHELA said no such thing, although it's apparent that many of their employees were against the case. The case was filed by the Missouri AG, who doesn't require every (or indeed any) individual employee of MOHELA to agree in order to prove harm to the state of Missouri.

"In Supreme Court oral arguments, it was revealed that MOHELA hasn’t made a contribution to that fund in 15 years...Furthermore, an analysis from the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective shows that MOHELA stands to gain revenue if debt cancellation goes forward."

The Student Loan Case’s Unwilling Participant (https://prospect.org/justice/2023-06-19-student-loan-cancell...)

So they didn't say they were not harmed, not even in those internal emails (which are pearl-clutching about the optics of the situation). After that, what we have left is an analysis by a third party which has been ripped to shreds:

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/05/06/new-report-on-state-sta...

When Adler says that the report is "carefully worded", what he means is that it is designed to mislead, and he's right.

> The authors of the report are essentially trying to argue that because MOHELA revenues are higher than they used to be, it does not matter that, without loan cancellation, they would be higher still.

Edit: Volokh -> Adler

So if MOHELA were actually harmed -- shouldn't they be the plaintiff in the lawsuit?

Their owners - the State of Missouri - are the plaintiff. It should go without saying that I don't require my employees to support legal actions I undertake relating to an entity that I own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Education_Loan_Authorit...

Edit: In reality, the technicalities in this case stretch that analogy - Adler writes about that as well in his penultimate paragraph, linking to opinions falling on either side:

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/02/08/arguments-for-standing-...

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/02/09/third-party-standing-do...

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/09/05/does-anyone-have-standi...

It doesn't, because 6 justices agreed with the majority opinion rather than her interpretation.

And surely THESE justices are the magically right ones!

The supreme court is made up of people, and a significant amount of it's current people have very specific ideologies from very specific institutions. Why is it clear the opinion crafted by that institution is the "correct" one?

> And it is a danger to a democratic order.

Quite the reverse. Congress needs to vote on a spending bill that large. Biden is President, not King, and Congress cannot make him King.

If you hire a plumber to fix your toilet, and said "bill me whatever for it", and the plumber charges you a million bucks, I bet that wouldn't hold up in court, either. IANAL, but laws never lay things down precisely (it's impossible), and the entire purpose of the Judiciary is to provide reasonable interpretations of it.

“That may have been a good idea, or it may have been a bad idea. Either way, it was what Congress said” writes Justice Kagan, in dissent to this principle.

Congress should have sued biden. That's the problem here.

Instead, here we have a bank suing because of government spending? How does that work? How was the bank harmed by loan forgiveness away from the bank?

Congress can sue and if they feel like the president is misinterpreting the law it's their job to sue. Letting something like this get decided via an uninterested 3rd party is what's dangerous.

What's next, can military contractors sue if we cut military spending? Can insurance agencies sue if we pass universal healthcare? Can they sue now over medicaid?

What's happened here is you hired a plumber to fix your toilet. He did just that, but then when it came time for the bill he said "You know what, nm, I'm not going to charge you for that". However, karen next door got charged for her plumbing so obviously she took the plumber to court for not forgiving her plumbing bill.

How does that make sense? The plumbing company has the power to fire the plumber or sue him and recover the cost of that bill. But they chose not to because forgiving bills looks good.

Yes she did:

> The Secretary’s authority was bounded: He could do only what was “necessary” to alleviate the emergency’s impact on affected borrowers’ ability to repay their student loans.

It was not "necessary" to forgive the loans.

Agreed, they well could have suspended interest and payments for a given time period to be revisited. It would have been difficult to combat such a relief with a given lifetime. That time could even have been as broad as say 5 years in order to get a more permanent solution in place. Likely still would have seen pushback, but at least a better legal footing.

It isn't the SCOTUS role to give people what they want, it's to determine legality under the framework of the constitution.

One can find arguments one either side as to whether or not the HEROES act made $430 billion in debt forgiveness legal by the Secretary of Education, but I can't see how in any way this was _obviously_ legal.

https://www.congress.gov/108/plaws/publ76/PLAW-108publ76.pdf

Biden made debt forgiveness part of his campaign strategy knowing it would be a difficult legal road, and he deserves some of the criticism for creating the expectation that debt would be erased at the risk of them being let down in the future.

Much as I agree that this was executive overreach, Trump did a ton of executive and legislating from the oval office, and the courts did not keep him in check.

Classic example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13771

This should have been ruled unconstitutional, but they let him get away with it and tons of other garbage executive orders.

The courts only care about executive overreach when democrats do it.

I agree should have been; and agree that the Justices can be blind to their own contradictions, or that at times they start with the conclusion they want and seek a means to justify reaching it. Unfortunate. I tend to think that there are two justices who do that in particular most of all. That would be Alito and Thomas, who are, I believe, "movement judges". I haven't had enough time to evaluate the newest Democratic justices. Gorsuch has surprised on a few issues, for example. So has Kavaugnah in fact.

As I recall, quite a few of Trump's EOs were overturned by the courts.

They did shut down some of his more blatant stuff, but he just spit out so many clearly absurd executive orders that even a genuine supreme court probably couldn't have kept up.

But that's like his entire strategy: It's just a gish gallop

There was a lawsuit to stop that EO, which got rejected at Federal Court due to lack of standing. Those who filed the suit declined to appeal.

The student loan thing got overturned by the Supreme Court - that is, it got upheld at the Federal Court level, same as EO 13771 did. The difference is that those appealing it kept fighting.

So I'm not sure it's fair to blame the courts. Blame those fighting EO 13771 for deciding not to appeal. Or maybe they were right not to appeal, deciding that it was an unwinnable case, in which case it's still hard to blame the courts.

Obama signed a fair number of executive orders (277) and was not really checked either. Trump was certainly on track to significantly outpace that count, he was simply continuing a trend of overusing executive orders to achieve what really should have been legislation. This abuse of power is completely bi-partisan.

Of course, I could now say something to the effect of democrats having selective memory when it comes to talking about sort of thing... but that wouldn't useful, fully correct, or factual and these sorts of statements are much more self service than revealing outrageous truths.

Obama's XOs were almost all constitutional. He was a constitutional law professor and Obama is unironically someone who should serve on the supreme court given his deep legal experience.

The overwhelming majority of trumps meaningful XOs were not constitutional at all.

On page 23:

> As then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi explained:

  “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” Press Conference, Office of the Speaker of the House (July 28, 2021).

huh. Imagine that... I have read horrific statements in the congressional record by Joe Biden over the years opposing student loan forgiveness, gays, minority children, and criminal justice reform. It seems all politicians follow the same rule: Forget anything we have ever said or done, just agree and do what we say today.

Biden had 2 years with control of Congress. He should have gone through normal channels and passed this. He already spent $X trillions on random "infrastructure" bills, surely he could have included student loan forgiveness in there if he really thought it was important. This feels like a clear political move by him to get credit for something that he never could have passed anyway.

..Like the billions sent to Ukraine. Choices were made and the administration has to live with the consequences.

This is a lot to read and I'm not very good at legalese... Anyone care to explain in layman's terms?

Congress never directly authorized the president to forgive student loans. Biden was claiming that he had the power indirectly because of a law that says he can "modify" loans in times of "emergency" (this was used to pause repayment in 2020). But SCOTUS has ruled that fully forgiving them too far beyond merely "modifying". There is a principle called the "major questions doctrine" that any major action must be very explicitly authorized by Congress (i.e. Congress doesn't grant huge powers without saying so).

Interesting -- is a "major action" defined legally as well?

The first three pages are a summary in relatively plain language.

[GPT-4 generated summary]

The case: The Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of Education exceeded his authority under the HEROES Act when he canceled $430 billion of student loan debt in 2022. The Court held that the Act only allowed the Secretary to make minor changes to existing provisions, not to create a new loan forgiveness program.

The standing: The Court found that Missouri had standing to challenge the Secretary’s plan because it harmed MOHELA, a public corporation created and controlled by the State to provide student loans. The Court said that the harm to MOHELA in its public function was a direct injury to Missouri itself.

The reasoning: The Court relied on the text and purpose of the HEROES Act, as well as its precedents on major questions and separation of powers. The Court said that the Act did not authorize the Secretary to rewrite the Education Act, which specified limited circumstances for loan discharge. The Court also said that Congress would not have intended to delegate such sweeping authority to the Secretary through a subtle device like permission to “waive or modify”.

The SCOTUS feels that there should continue to be enforcement of the idea of separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

The SCOTUS believes, in this very specific instance, that the executive should not have the power to forgive student loans and it should be left to, what I assume, is the legislative branch to deal with it instead.

The Republican SCOTUS feels that it should have completed unchecked power to invalidate any laws or policies to which it is ideologically opposed. Its power has never been checked. It has only ever usurped and expanded its power, and only ever moderated under the threat of being packed. The constitution gives Congress the explicit power to set the jurisdiction of the supreme court, which to my knowledge, has never been used to restrict their power.

The Republican supreme court believes all policy decisions should be left to the legislative branch, not because Congress cannot delegate authority, but because the filibuster completely guarantees that nothing can become law without a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, which in the current political environment means votes from several members of the hyper partisan Republican party.

It's like all the celebration of George Washington relinquishing power after two terms. "Wow no one has done that before! So progressive!" But he was a property owner, in a country where only property owners could vote, and he knew that only property owners would hold any elected positions in the US government. He knew that the political interests of landowners would take precedence over all others, so why would he care who ran the country? This is the situation with our Congress. Nothing can pass without a supermajority in the Senate, requiring hyper partisan Republicans to give Democrats a win, which they will not do.

The supreme courts power is very clearly checked by congress’ ability to pass legislation. Debt forgiveness can still happen, it just required congress to legislate instead of hoping executive orders can be used to replace legislation.

Congress used their constitutional authority to delegate certain decisions to an office administered by the executive branch because they decided they would be ineffective at legislating on the individual issues. The court is replacing that legislation with an injunction forcing Congress to legislate on the individual issues. Congress can eventually legislate a check on judicial overreach, but the damage here is done.

The Department of Education issued the loans. They should be able to decide if they want to collect them. The money has already been spent so the only "cost" is the opportunity cost of collecting. So it's not an appropriations issue.

"the money has already been spent "

With the expectation that they will get it back. Its not like they bought 400 million dollars with of gummy bears and they are all gone anyway.

So people not realize that the money has to come from somewhere? Colleges got the money and spent a little bit of it on educating students.

If it’s not paid back then regular people need to have their tax money diverted from hopefully useful things to pay for this.

Sure it’s great if every random government agency can spend unlimited money. Well at least until we become the next Venezuela.

Congress directed the DoE to issue the loans. Do not try to usurp Congress's authority.

The executive branch has to carry out the laws that Congress passes. They don't get to do whatever they want. We live in (kind of) a democracy.

> The Department of Education issued the loans. They should be able to decide if they want to collect them.

It's not the DoE's money, it's the taxpayers' money. No, the DoE should not be able to unilaterally decide that it is no longer accountable for it. There is a proper channel for that sort of decision, one which (in theory, at least) includes the input of the taxpayers. It's called Congress.

Disappointed by the outcome, but not surprised. IMO SCOTUS is no longer trustworthy when it comes to impartiality. Polarization has infected every branch of government including SCOTUS. This judgement simply falls along US political party lines. Perhaps, it has never been the case. However, I think we have seen an increase of conservative policy and interpretations of law become the standard due to a Republican super majority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com