Several weeks ago, the Supreme Court ended, at least temporarily, Joe Biden’s quest to stick taxpayers with hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of unpaid student debt loans.
Biden says he will continue to fight this fight, but that may be futile based on the comments made by the Supreme Court justices when the decision was handed down.
Those comments are what we are going to take quick glance at now to see how this will impact future rulings.
Big Findings
First and foremost, there was the fact that the court found that states have standing in this fight.
Numerous red states stepped up to show that the forgiveness policy would be harmful to their state, giving them standing in the case, which means they had the right to sue the administration.
Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina made the argument that such a policy would hurt local businesses in their states, reported Forbes, and the justices, at least the conservative justices, bought it.
Luke Herrine, an assistant professor of law at the University of Alabama, was not sure if that would hold up as a precedent or not, stating, “I don’t think they actually took the standing issues all that seriously. And I have no idea if that will be a precedent, or if it’s just a one-off so they could get to the merits, because they didn’t like this case,” reported CNBC.
If this does stand as precedent, it will be game over for Biden regardless of what little trick he tries to pull out of his sleeve next.
The second point is that we now have a firm precedent that the Heroes Act cannot be used to cancel large debts.
This has always been the main sticking point in that such power cannot be in the hands of a single person, in this case, the Secretary of Education.
Roberts, in his majority opinion, wrote, ″Can the Secretary use his powers to abolish $430 billion in student loans, completely canceling loan balances for 20 million borrowers, as a pandemic winds down to its end? We can’t believe the answer would be yes.”
That is even worse for Biden, as any piece of legislation where he now tries to find a backdoor will have to measure up to that precedent.
Honestly, if the court had ruled differently, we might as well dismantle Congress and allow the sitting president and his cabinet members to create and pass legislation. I just cannot imagine that our Founders envisioned a single person ever having the authority to make such a financial decision without the checks and balances of Congress.
Call me crazy, but I am pretty sure that is why we had that pesky little war with the British crown to take our independence.
