As Joe Biden’s half-trillion dollar student loan bailout faces the chopping block, The Economist journo Steven Mazie is warning that the Supreme Court may see a dip in popularity if they decide to swing the axe. Joe Biden’s sweeping and unprecedented executive order would circumvent Congress to rob taxpayers of $400 billion, but Mazie believes that popularity, not constitutionality, should influence the court’s decision.
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“If the Supreme Court throws out Biden’s student debt relief plan, some 20-30 million Americans are going to look at five or six justices as costing them $10k or $20k,” Mazie wrote on Twitter. “That could drive SCOTUS’s popularity still lower.”
If the Supreme Court throws out Biden’s student debt relief plan, some 20-30 million Americans are going to look at five or six justices as costing them $10k or $20k. That could drive SCOTUS’s popularity still lower.
— Steven Mazie (@stevenmazie) February 28, 2023
“Is this a parody account or are you journalisming?” Florida Board of Education member Ryan Petty replied.
Mazie’s analysis is par for the course among Democrats.
Biden’s executive action would forgive upwards of $20,000 in student loan debt for every American earning less than $125,000. The plan was announced in August, ahead of the 2022 midterms. Once Biden’s (blatantly illegal) plan had fulfilled its goal of energizing 2022 voters, it was tied up in court, which is now likely to be struck down. The Supreme Court began hearing arguments challenging the plan on Tuesday.
“Some of the biggest mistakes in the court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive or emergency power,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said during oral arguments. “Some of the finest moments in the court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power, and that’s continued not just in the Korean War but post-9/11, in some of the cases there.”
The Biden administration’s attempt to bypass congress—and redistribute $400 billion in wealth—is not expected to survive the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Democrats have offered a weak defense of the student loan bailout. Commentators, like Steven Mazie, say the court should make its ruling based on “popularity.” The Biden administration’s lawyers argue that the bailout is legal under the HEROES Act, a 2003 law intended to grant relief to U.S. service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
CNN analyst Devan Cole tried to argue on Monday that the Court’s ability to decide the case was unfair since “[t]he fate of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program… lies in the hands of nine relatively wealthy people who graduated from a short list of elite private schools.”
Neither case seems to be all that convincing to the Court.
“We take very seriously the idea of separation of powers and that power should be divided to prevent its abuse,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, noting that there was precedent for striking down executive actions like the student loan bailout. Roberts cited the court’s decision in 2020 to strike down Donald Trump’s attempt to unilaterally dismantle the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) plan without asking Congress first.
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If the Court decides to strike down the student loan bailout, Republicans may also gain an edge in challenging future executive actions by the Biden administration. The high-stakes ruling is expected sometime in June or early July.
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