Read It For Yourself: Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Blocked By Judge

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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22 Responses

  1. Burt Likko says:

    I express no opinion here on the soundness of the Court’s legal reasoning because, frankly, I’ve not read the opinion in sufficient detail to do so. Rather, I comment on the politics of the situation.

    Democrats can argue that this was a Trump-appointed District Judge in the Fifth Circuit, which is also packed with Trump-appointed judges and one of the most conservative, if not THE most conservative, of the several Circuit Courts of Appeal. There was no need for the conservative activists who brought the suit to do so here, other than forum-shopping. And conservatives have also packed SCOTUS. So the result here appears likely to get affirmed on appeal and likely again before SCOTUS.

    Meaning it will cost a little bit of time, which is plausibly justified as a defense of the government’s actions against an external challenge, for the Solicitor General to pursue those appeals and probably get those results in the next roughly two years. The banks will be collecting money on student loan payments as before throughout, so this costs nothing to anyone but the student loan debtors.

    Who are, mostly, young people already resentful of the loan payments they believe (rightly or wrongly) were forced upon them on extortionate terms. They now know Biden tried to relieve this for them.

    From the UK Guardian:

    While final figures are still pouring in, it is estimated that 27% of young voters aged 18-29 cast a ballot in 2022, making this the midterm election with the second highest youth voter turnout in almost three decades, after 2018. In some key battleground states, turnout was even higher, at 31%, and support for Democratic candidates was roughly over 60%, driven in large part by the fight for abortion rights after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.

    An Edison Research National Election Pool exit poll showed that 18-29s were the only age group in which a strong majority supported Democrats. Support for Democrats was even higher among Black youth at 89% and Latino youth at 68%.

    So here’s my proposition: this only accelerates the trend of younger voters being angered to the polls, and angered to vote in a Democratic direction. Which will set a pattern for them, a habit of preferring Democrats to Republicans. Are the Republicans sacrificing a piece of their long term political future to prevail on this issue today?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

      I think that the politics of the situation should also take into account that this doesn’t really address anything beyond the people who happen to have college debt right now.

      Like, the kid in 9th grade? This does nothing to help them.

      It doesn’t touch the structure at all and there are a dozen things that would actually touch the root instead of temporarily removing some leaves.

      While I’m sure that there are many younger voters who might be energized to vote for democrats due to this, I looked up college enrollment rates and saw this:

      The overall college enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds was 40 percent in 2020. The college enrollment rate in 2020 was higher for 18- to 24-year-olds who were Asian (64 percent) than for those who were White (41 percent), Hispanic (36 percent), Black (36 percent), of Two or more races (34 percent), Pacific Islander (34 percent), and American Indian/Alaska Native (22 percent).

      There’s a joke that a buddy told me after the original announcement of the debt relief:

      “Do you have any college debt?”
      “No.”
      “Well, you do now.”

      While I’m pretty sure that there are people who will be motivated to vote Dem because of this, it strikes me as likely that there will also be people on the other side wondering about the “fairness” of paying off college debt for people who are likely to be better off anyway.

      I don’t know that it’d be a wash, but given that this was set up to be a one-time thing, I’m not sure that it’d have legs beyond one or two elections before it becomes “where’s *MY* bailout?”

      And given that this executive order appealed to a Covid Emergency Declaration as its justification, I’m not certain that they’d be able to do it a second time (of course they could just appeal to whatever emergency we’re going to be having when this rolls around again).Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Burt Likko says:

      My cohort of 30-44 year olds was +4 Democratic allegedly and the 18-29 year old age group was plus 29 Democratic. My cohort was plus 4 Democratic mainly because of non-white voters. Under 30 voters was one where the majority of whites voted Democratic. At least based on initial glances, this usually takes months to fully flesh out.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Burt Likko says:

      It would be interesting to see actual data on why young people are so strongly Democratic.

      In my experience, there isn’t any one Big Issue, like the Vietnam war. My hypothesis is that it is a range of issues, from college loans to abortion to anti LGBTQ bigotry to racism to global warming denialism that all sort of combine to create a deep anti-GOP sentiment among young people.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Chip Daniels says:

        When I was a young adolescent in the early 1990s, MTV placed two openly gay people on the real world. You had Beth in 1992 and then more dramatically, Pedro the HIV-positive educator and activist in 1993. Pedro was also in a biracial relationship. Both seasons featured stories about their friendships with more conservative cast members.

        I think these two somewhat quiet acts were much more world-changing than is normally given credit for because it is kind of cringe to credit the Real World with changing the world. The 1990s was still very conservative though and macho. This was the height of people using gay as a synonym for pathetic or something bad/basic.

        I think under-30s these days now know more openly LBGTQ from middle on wards than my generation did. There are people I know from high school that are LBGTQ but they did not come out until after graduation even in my relative liberal town.

        The open bigotry of older reactionaries now animating the GOP is a real disgusting thing for them.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    There is a question about how much Trump’s picks to the judiciary will be the gift that keeps on giving even if Trumpism fails and we enter a new Democratic majority stage (yet to be seen but a possibility). McConnell and Leo managed to use Trump and luck to confirm a large number of judiciary spots. The judges they selected tended to be on the young side for judges. Some are not even 40 yet. They all tend to be highly ideological to the points of being firebrands. As Burt notes, this results in a fair amount of venue shopping and judges willing to take extreme positions like declare themselves the heads of DHS or questioning Biden’s role in the chain of command.

    Perhaps they will be humbled by the election but I doubt it.Report

  3. Brandon Berg says:

    This case is a particularly dramatic illustration of the untenability of the “particularized harm” requirement for standing pulled out of the Taft Court’s collective ass in Massachusetts v Mellon. The debt cancellation inflicts hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on taxpayers in general, but because no one can claim particularized harm, no one can sue to stop this blatant abuse of executive power? That’s insane.

    The Court needs to overturn Massachusetts v. Mellon and establish a mechanism for taxpayers as a class to sue to block unconstitutional spending.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      To flip this around for those of you who can’t see how any policy you like could possibly be unconstitutional, consider a scenario where a Republican President cuts taxes by executive order. For example, the next Republican President might order the IRS to permanently cancel all tax liability on corporate income for the duration of his administration.

      While this is obviously unconstitutional (note that I can acknowledge this while supporting abolition of the corporate income tax), no one can meet the “particularized harm” requirement for standing, so no one would be able to sue to stop it.

      This is not a crazy hypothetical. If the Supreme Court declines to hear any cases regarding this issue on the grounds that no one has standing, I actually expect the next Republican President to use this loophole to implement some kind of tax cut by executive order.

      Edit: I totally missed this, but there are a bunch of news stories from 2020 about Trump using executive order to declare a Social Security tax holiday (deferral, not full cancellation). That definitely should have been challenged if it actually went through, but I wasn’t able to find any follow-up on what happened.Report

      • InMD in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        I think your reaction is pretty over the top. The real gripe should be with Congress for writing vague laws the executive then interprets broadly. The remedy for that is for Congress to clarify the law. Our system anticipates attempted overreach and allows for better means of correction than requiring the courts to adjudicate any and all hypotheticals any person brings in the door. That’s particularly the case if the standard for standing you’re proposing is ‘individual is a tax payer.’Report

        • Brandon Berg in reply to InMD says:

          Okay. Next president cuts taxes by executive order. There’s not enough support in Congress for impaechment and removal. What remedies are available?Report

          • InMD in reply to Brandon Berg says:

            I’m not sure it’s possible to speculate on that hypothetical without quite a bit more information. So the boring lawyer answer is it depends.

            But to the larger point I think you’re raising, the remedy for public policy we don’t like is usually the ballot box.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

              I’m sure we can find lots of other misuses for this.

              We’re giving the President the ability to use the gov purse as a slush fund in a very large range of situations.

              That corrupt when Biden tries to use it to get votes, and it’s going to be corrupt when Team Red tries to use it to get votes.Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                As I said initially, the gripe is that Congress passed an overly broad statute. The president then took an aggressive, opportunistic read of it. The solution is for Congress to clarify the law, not allow every citizen to try to litigate it in the federal courts under some nebulous theory of harm.Report

              • Brandon Berg in reply to InMD says:

                It doesn’t matter how clear the law is, since the merits of the case are totally irrelevant if nobody has standing to challenge executive spending. What the law actually says simply does not come up until standing is established.

                That aside, I think your claim that this just isn’t a case for the courts is flat-out wrong. Resolving disputes over the of interpretation of the law is precisely what the judiciary is for.Report

              • InMD in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                With regard to the specific issue it does indeed appear to be working its way through the courts, hence this post. I’m not losing over that either.

                What I am saying is that your theory of standing where any citizen can show up and sue without being harmed is a bad one.Report

              • Philip H in reply to InMD says:

                What I am saying is that your theory of standing where any citizen can show up and sue without being harmed is a bad one.

                The Administrative Procedures Act, ESA, and Marine Mammal Protection Act grant all citizens standing to sue for federal decisions taken under their auspices. So technically he’s not wrong.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                It doesn’t matter how clear the law is, since the merits of the case are totally irrelevant if nobody has standing to challenge executive spending.

                As I have often noted, Congress holds and jealously guards the power of the federal purse. When it comes to federal spending, if the President gets too far outside the bounds they set, they do have standing to remedy this.Report