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Notes -
Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:
The amusing thing here to me is that we got two major SCOTUS rulings in two days that are, on the face of it, not directly related to each other in any obvious way (besides the fact that they both deal with the university system). One could conceivably support one ruling and oppose the other. The types of legal arguments used in both cases are certainly different. And yet we all know that the degree of correlation among the two issues is very high. If you support one of the rulings, you're very likely to support the other, and vice versa.
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest? The group identity angle is obvious. AA tends to benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians. Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder. Whites and Asians tend to be richer than blacks and Hispanics. So, given a choice of "do you want a better chance of your kids getting into college, and do you also not want your tax dollars going to people who couldn't pay off their student loans", people would understandably answer "yes" to both - assuming you’re in the appropriate group and that is indeed the bargain that’s being offered to you. But perhaps that's uncharitable. Which is why I'm asking for alternative models.
As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution. If Congress wants to amend the amendment to say that organizations can discriminate based on race as long as it benefits blacks, they're welcome to try. If Congress wants to forgive student loan debts enough to actually include it in the budget, they're welcome to do that as well. If Congress wants to write actual legislation protecting abortion, they can do that. If they can't, then they shouldn't.
This is not a legal reason, but as far as student loans go, $10-20k is exactly the range lower middle class people should be able to pay off! They pay off cars in that range just fine, all the time. There are also various programs aimed at that demographic, like debt forgiveness for teachers and government workers. People around the poverty level don't need to make payments on federal loans anyway, on account of income based repayment plans. It doesn't prevent lenders from issuing auto loans or mortgages, and family size is taken into account.
The problem area seems to be those with high debt (which this wouldn't have made much of a dent in anyway), making nominally good money in extremely high cost of living areas, so that they really are struggling to pay rent on their small shared apartment, but looking at their income the financial institution expects them to pay down their loan, and this is too much of.a stretch. I don't feel too sorry for anyone struggling to make it in one of the most expensive cities in the world, though.
Wasn’t the justification supposed to be that this was pandemic-specific? I.e. the whole economy contracted, and people with the reasonable expectation of paying it suddenly couldn’t. $20k was never supposed to make the difference for med school.
I’m not sure that it actually was targeting extreme COLA like the Bay Area, either. More a general buyout for people who tried to get their first job in 2020.
I also object to the claim that both these cases were prima facie unconstitutional. See the dissents for legitimate arguments!
The pandemic is why federal loans have been deferred entirely these past three years, and I suppose that makes sense. I am not really against either the pandemic deferral, or pretty low income adjusted payments. I'm not even completely against a bill, by congress, reforming loans going forward and forgiving some (even all!) loans to people below some income threshold who probably shouldn't have been issued them.
Sure, it was not unanimous, and the dissenting judges are not puppets or stupid or anything like that. But the question was about what the theory is behind conservative jurisprudence, and conservatives do think that it's overstepping and wrong.
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