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I’ve previously written about how much I dislike student loan forgiveness policies and framing college education as a public good. Now that the Biden administration is attempting to implement the policy, the discourse has shifted away from whether it’s a good idea to whether it’s a legally valid policy, with two challenges currently going to the Supreme Court. For a defense of the policy that extends all the way to declaring that the challenges are completely illegitimate, we can look to a Voxsplainer from Ian Millheiser:
I suggest a full readthrough, but that does get to the heart of the matter. The full text of the Heros Act is here and is about as clear as Milheiser suggest above. After some initial throatclearing, the act says:
I don’t see anything in the ensuing paragraphs that would narrow this meaningfully, although I welcome input from anyone with a sharper legal eye than I have. Nonetheless, I find myself looking at this as an utterly dishonest exploitation of a law that was written with a clear purpose in mind. The Heros Act was created to handle soldiers being sent abroad to fight the War on Terror; whether this was good or bad policy, it had a clear purpose and a somewhat defined cost cap based on how many people are actually affiliated with the military or meaningfully economically impacted. The Biden student debt cancellation takes advantage of the “or national emergency” provision by declaring that everyone was impacted by the declared Covid emergency and therefore all student debt was subject to cancellation per this bill.
This, I suppose, is where I rediscover that whatever judicial philosophy I adhere to looks more like originalism than textualism, but really looks even more like I adhere to my own You Must Be Kidding Doctrine. I don’t buy for a moment that the people that drafted this legislation intended to empower the executive branch to declare an emergency that affects all Americans and that this would grant the power to cancel as much student debt for as large of a group of people as they like. Had they intended to do so, they probably would have just done that explicitly rather than spending a page clearing their throats about the importance of the United States military.
I see many speculating that the ostensibly conservative Supreme Court will use the Major Questions Doctrine to overturn the policy:
I have to confess that I personally despise student loan “forgiveness” so much that I would be enthusiastic about nearly any convoluted reasoning that the Supreme Court comes up with to reject it as a legitimate policy. I am further bolstered in that attitude by what I perceive as decades of utterly ridiculous, lawless rulings that build on the time honored principle of deciding what I want and figuring out why the law agrees with me later. In this particular case, I think it’s actually fairly reasonable to say that this $400 billion policy and license for trillions more is not a legitimate use of executive authority delegated by Heros act, but I don’t think I can actually prove that through looking at the language in the text.
What say you?
I can understand the opposition to student loan forgiveness, but I think it would be possible to achieve the same goals in a way that would seem (to me at least) a bit more just - and that is to make sure that the universities and colleges which took in all of this money pay the price. I find it hard to get too angry at people who fell for what is essentially a scam when they took what was actually a fairly rational action at the time.
I think that student loans shouldn't be forgiven, but instead transferred to the colleges and universities that handed out those dud loans. That's where the real anti-social behaviour is, especially when institutions like Harvard have utterly obscene endowments. If a university or college took an extraordinary amount of money in exchange for giving someone a worthless education, they should absolutely pay the price. You'd need to have some checks and balances, but leaving higher education bodies responsible for non-performing student loan debt would give them skin in the game and align their incentives. Forcing them to carefully decide whether a given loan would actually be paid off would have all kinds of positive consequences. It would have a lot of negative consequences for my opponents in the culture war, but that's a price I'd be willing to pay.
That's running off of mistake theory.
Think of it as ideology-based where the universities are on the left and forgving the loans is a way to insulate the universities from the real-world consequences of encouraging degrees that are bad in the job market but great for spreading their brand of politics. Under this theory, the government doesn't want to make the unversities pay the price.
Oh I totally agree that that's the case currently. I'm making a proposal which I understand has zero chance of being ratified under the current system - you'd need some kind of firebrand populist to make it into government (and actually have the ability to make and pass meaningful laws).
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