A Legal Reckoning on Student-Loan Forgiveness

[Geee]

National Review

The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in two cases challenging Joe Biden’s power to spend a half-trillion to a trillion taxpayer dollars forgiving student-loan debt without the consent of Congress. The president’s abuse of “emergency” wartime powers passed in the 2002 HEROES Act is nothing less than lawless royalism. It continues his effort to use the Covid emergency to assert unprecedented powers, such as the capacity to order the compulsory vaccination of the nation’s workers and to prohibit the eviction of apartment tenants for nonpayment of rent.

At least vaccination is a Covid-specific policy, and the eviction moratorium was never designed to last forever. By contrast, student-loan-debt forgiveness was a preexisting policy demand of progressives before the pandemic, its effect would be to eliminate existing debts permanently, and it was issued at a time when Biden himself was assuring the nation that the pandemic was over and the economy was in full recovery.

 

If the Court cannot stop the president from raiding the Treasury to buy votes and reward friends on the most implausible of legal pretexts, what is it for? A majority of the Court appears to recognize that the HEROES Act does not grant the power in question — a reality that even Nancy Pelosi acknowledged until it became clear that Biden intended to act when he could not get such a plan through Congress.

The statute says that the secretary of education can “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs” when “necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” Chief Justice John Roberts set the tone for the argument by noting that Justice Antonin Scalia once observed that “modified in our view connotes moderate change. He said it might be good English to say that the French Revolution modified the status of the French nobility, but only because there’s a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm.” Moreover, the chief justice observed that, even if terms such as “waive or modify” could be construed to encompass the outright cancellation of student debt, the Court’s “major question doctrine” requires more — namely, a citation to “clear congressional authorization” of the specific action taken by the administration. No one can plausibly claim that the HEROES Act even anticipated, much less green-lighted, half a trillion dollars in relief to a favored class of debtors without additional congressional input.

[Geee]

The Problems of the Student Loan Program Exceed Biden's Forgiveness Plan

Since the student loan program has been in effect, colleges and universities have been able to increase their tuitions 4.6 times faster than the rate of inflation, going from $1,410 annually in the early 1970s to $39,500 in 2022. At Harvard, tuition and room and board for 2023 is $76,763. Thus, a program to aid students has become yet another way for the government to subsidize colleges and universities. It’s unlikely that Congress had this objective in mind when it approved this program in 1992..

[SDwaters]

 

 

Milton Friedman presented the "Four different ways of spending money" in his book "Free to Choose"

For those who aren't familiar, the likelyhood of the spender exercising caution when spending money declines as you go down and/or right on the chart.

The Federal Student Loan program falls under the bottom half of chart, which is one reason why its proponents never want to address the gross inflation of college budgets, costs, and administrative overhead.

 

[SDwaters]

As court debates student loans, borrowers see disconnect | AP News

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Niara Thompson couldn’t shake her frustration as the Supreme Court debated President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation. As she listened from the audience Tuesday, it all felt academic. There was a long discussion on the nuances of certain words. Justices asked lawyers to explore hypothetical scenarios.

For Thompson, none of it is hypothetical. A student at the University of Georgia, she grew up watching her parents struggle with student loans and will graduate with about $50,000 of her own student debt.

“It felt like people who could never understand why we would want something like this,” she said. “I wanted to be like, ‘Y’all don’t understand. Y’all are focusing on this, but there’s people out here who are struggling to find food for their families.’”

Things I wonder if Ms. Thompson understands:

1. Taking out a student loan is a contract.

2. Contracts are legally binding.

3. Unless someone was forcing her to join the contract, she's obligated to abide by its terms.

4. Her "wanting" something isn't a real good reason for someone else to get stuck cleaning up her mess.

[Geee]

2 hours ago, SDwaters said:

For Thompson, none of it is hypothetical. A student at the University of Georgia, she grew up watching her parents struggle with student loans and will graduate with about $50,000 of her own student debt.

“It felt like people who could never understand why we would want something like this,” she said. “I wanted to be like, ‘Y’all don’t understand. Y’all are focusing on this, but there’s people out here who are struggling to find food for their families.’”

 

What about the people who are struggling with mortgages - shouldn't we just wave a magic wand and make that mortgage payment disappear?

[Geee]

LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS FALLING BEHIND ON CAR BILLS

Next, lets get rid of those pesky car loans!!!!

[Geee]

John Roberts takes center stage in the battle over student loan forgiveness

 

Chief Justice John Roberts pounded away on the price tag – “about half a trillion dollars” – for the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program during oral arguments Tuesday. But as he repeatedly cited the big cost, he reinforced a broader, more familiar point that could further undercut executive power and enhance the Supreme Court itself.

Roberts was especially active in the center chair, asserting the court’s authority and his own, during a session that lasted three and a half hours. Now in his 18th term, Roberts has sometimes struggled to control his colleagues, the majority of whom reside to his ideological right but these cases afforded him a commanding presence in an area of the law he’s been driving.

The 68-year-old Roberts pressed an emerging “major questions doctrine,” embraced by the right and generally forbidding agency actions on matters of vast economic and political significance without clear authority from Congress.

 

He also showed an attitude toward basic policy choices, as he questioned the fairness of federal assistance for a student who had taken out a college loan, over someone who’d never had a college opportunity and instead started a lawn care service.

“Along comes the government and tells that person: You don’t have to pay your loan,” Roberts said of a hypothetical college loan borrower. “Nobody’s telling the person who is trying to set up the lawn service business that he doesn’t have to pay his loan. He still does, even though his tax dollars are going to support the forgiveness of the loan for the college graduate, who’s now going to make a lot more than him over the course of his lifetime.”

[Geee]