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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.
This doesn't seem right. The student loan case hinged on the wording of a statute, not a reading of the Constitution. See page 12 of the opinion:
As for the affirmative action case, it is definitely not based on a literal reading of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If it were, it would be a much shorter opinion. The opinion is instead all about whether the affirmative action regimes satisfy strict scrutiny:
Moreover, had the decision been based on a simple literal reading of "equal protection," then the footnote re military academies would make no sense:
This is hilarious, because I just saw the front page of NYT with a Biden quote on the student loan case ruling: "I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution."
Of course, I happen to totally agree with you that this case was statutory interpretation. If anything, I'm just noticing that this is one of those moments where Biden says something that, had Trump made a similar mistake, it would have been front page news... not because they're cheering on what he said, but because they're aghast about how he could be so ignorant and wrong about this obvious thing (that is a technical little detail, really), and how it must mean that he has no idea what is going on and is therefore incapable to hold office under the 25th Amendment.
I think you're nitpicking here. @Gaashk's comment that it's a literal reading of the Constitution is probably correct. Your quote from the opinion about
is pretty easily understood as saying, "Whelp, a literal reading of the Constitution is that you can't do this. That said, there might be an exception to the literal reading of the Constitution." And sure, they spent most of their time on figuring out whether or not there was an exception for this case, but the result of finding that there isn't an exception is that you just go back to the default of a literal reading of the Constitution.
I would say that it might be misunderstood as saying that, but only by someone who has no actual understanding of the issue. After all, if taken literally, the Equal Protection clause would invalidate all laws, because all laws treat some groups differently than others. "No trucks allowed in tunnel" discrimates against truck drivers, and "people under 16 can't get a driver's license" discrimates against those under 16. That's why courts have said that the Equal Protection Clause is not meant literally: "Statutes create many classifications which do not deny equal protection; it is only "invidious discrimination" which offends the Constitution." Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 US 726, 732 (1963) [citing Williamson v. Lee Optical Co., 348 U. S. 483, 488-489 (1955) and Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas Co., 220 U. S. 61, 78-79 (1911)).
And, more generally, no justice employs a literal interpretation of the Constitution, nor have any in recent memory, except maybe Justice Black, though the only provision I know of in which he employed literal interpretation was re the free speech clause.
EPC doesn't say that, tho. Like, on its face. Nowhere in the literal words of the clause does it say that the laws cannot make any distinctions for any reason between people.
I think I'm coming around to Barrett's concurrence that sometimes, if you try hard enough to be a moron when reading something, you'll miss the most reasonable interpretation of the literal text. Having a modicum of context informs how you read so that you don't add in things when you're claiming that it's a literal reading.
Yes, it does say that. That is the literal meaning of "equal protection." See Ten Broek, Jacobus, and Joseph Tussman. "The equal protection of the laws." California Law Review 37 (1949): 341, 343 ["Here, then, is a paradox: The equal protection of the laws is a 'pledge of the protection of equal laws.' But laws may classify. And 'the very idea of classification is that of inequality. . . .'" (ellipsis in original)].
But that is exactly why no one interprets the Constitution using the literal meaning of words. "Congress shall make no law" does not mean "no law," and "speech" covers more than literal speech.
Sorry that they struggle to read in the California Law Review. (They try extra hard to read like morons.)
But try. Try in your own words to explain how "equal protection of the laws" means "no possible categorization in laws" means "no laws". It doesn't. It's not there. Clearly, the context, in Barrett's words, is that there are laws. So, given that there are laws, and you're trying to read this sentence about laws literally, please proceed to explain exactly how your literal reading implies that there are no valid laws. What "protection" would these not valid laws be providing?
I think the quote from the law review article makes that clear.
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