The Supreme Court ruled Biden’s student-loan forgiveness is illegal, meaning borrowers will resume payments without debt cancellation this year.
Thats quite a precedent. The president doesnt have discretion about his own department of education. Thats a complete undermining of the entire executive branch if its no longer able to make decisions about the executive branch.
Well the executive branch is useless, unless you put in the ultimate cheat code of having R as your party initial. then you can do no wrong and use the hidden magical wand behind the nixon painting to do anything.
unless you put in the ultimate cheat code of having R as your party initial.
Sucks that Republicans are so hellbent on forming a christo-fascist authoritarian regime with the only goal being to pump money into corporations and the wealthy.
Eh, this was always on shaky legal grounds. Even Pelosi herself said last year that she didn’t think the Executive had the authority to unilaterally do this, and as I understand, Biden was skeptical as well. It’s a bit of a stretch to say that Congress intended to allow the President to unilaterally void student debt when they passed a measure to allow for adjustments during emergencies.
The ostensible textualists on the Court are certainly being a little hypocritical, but it’s not an absurd ruling.
Major questions doctrine:
If a law is so broad that it brings about questions on how one should implement it, rather than asking Congress to fix it, SOCTUS gets to dictate what specifically the answer to the question is. But if Congress doesn’t like that answer SCOTUS gives, Congress may pass a law being more specific. That is, the Court isn’t indicating that the law, ruling, or order is unconstitutional, they are ruling that it is too broad in scope and that SCOTUS is “fixing it” for the time being. But Congress is openly invited to completely override anything they’ve said.
Now of course, “Major Questions” brings about the obvious. “What is the definition of too broad?” And of course there’s all kinds of precedent on that as well and SCOTUS saying “well this is broad, but this isn’t broad”. Since the WV vs EPA (2022) case, SCOTUS Conservatives have gotten a bit more … (and it may shock those that I’m using this word) “liberal” in what they consider “broad”. And the liberal justices are more than happy to point this out each and every time to the Conservatives:
It seems I was wrong. The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the “major questions doctrine” magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.
— Justice Kagan (brutally assaulting and ripping the Conservatives’ jugular while dissenting in WV v. EPA (cir. 2022))
So it looks like we’re in for a whole lot of “quite a precedent” as the Conservative Justices look posed to whip out the Major Questions doctrine to be allowed to “double think”. Major Questions isn’t usually used this often and by golly the Conservative Justices seem posed to right that perceived wrong, apparently. And the Liberal Justices have indicated, it’s not wise to over use this doctrine. The 6-3 bench isn’t forever.