SCOTUS rules on free speech as well as Biden’s debt forgiveness
SCOTUS is on a roll, with two more decisions in which the justices have voted 6-3, with all the Republican-appointed justices in the majority and the Democrat-appointed justices dissenting. The first case defends free speech:
The Court held 6–3 that “[t]he First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees.”…
Petitioners Lorie Smith and her company, 303 Creative LLC, challenged the application of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) against Smith, whose religious beliefs prohibit her from crafting some custom messages. Smith is a website designer who wants to expand her company’s offerings to include custom wedding websites.
While Smith and her company will serve any customer regardless of sexual orientation, she could not, consistent with her Christian faith, create a custom wedding website celebrating a same-sex wedding. Smith also wishes to post a notice that she will not create these custom websites for same-sex weddings.
The second decision – which actually involved two cases – says “no” to Biden’s debt forgiveness program:
Cardona announced on August 24, 2022, a plan to use the HEROES Act as the basis for executive action to discharge up to $20,000 in student-loan debt for qualifying borrowers.
In both cases, the Court was called on to decide whether the states and borrowers had standing to sue. In Nebraska, the Court needed to determine “whether the plan exceeds the Secretary’s statutory authority or is arbitrary and capricious.” In Brown, the Court needed to determine “whether the department’s plan is statutorily authorized and was adopted in a procedurally proper manner.”…
In Nebraska, the Court held 6–3 “[a]t least Missouri has standing.”…
Finding standing, the Court addressed the merits of the challenge to the plan. The Court accepted Cardona’s authority “to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions” for student loans under the HEROES Act but rejected the argument that this authority extended to “canceling $430 billion of student loan principal”…
In Brown, the Court, in an opinion by Alito, unanimously held the borrows lacked standing to challenge plan “[b]ecause respondents fail to establish that any injury they suffer from not having their loans forgiven is fairly traceable to the Plan.”
In a deft touch, the opinion cited a quote from none other than Nancy Pelosi, as follows:
Roberts quoted in the majority opinion comments that Pelosi gave during a press conference in July 2021, in which she said Biden did not have the authority to cancel student loans by executive order, only delay it.
“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” Pelosi said at the time.
But of course she later changed her mind.
More of the Court’s reasoning can be found here. Suffice to say the decision doesn’t rest on the quote from Pelosi as some sort of legal authority.
I just heard Biden’s response to the student debt forgiveness decision. He said he plans to reduce the maximum amount of repayment from 10% of the borrower’s income to only 5%. He then states that after 20 years of repayments, any left-over debt will be forgiven.
Why stop at a 5% cap? Get with the spirit of the thing Brandon and make it a 1% cap. Oh, wait… They’re saving that step for the 2028 election.
Listening to Biden and SecEd Cardona today. They sounded angry. It was not a good look. And their proposal to come up with a new program might win them some additional student votes, but I don’t think the current Supreme Court will look upon this new proposal with any more kindness than they looked at the current Executive Branch giveaway.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ny-democrat-complains-about-her-student-debt-after-scotus-ruling-gets-slammed-for-million-dollar-home/ar-AA1dgSZp
Some of us have been aware the USA is coming apart, its glue failing.
Nebraska wins the day! Yeah for Nebraska!
Funny watching the Dems meltdown over these SCOTUS decisions.
Can you imagine Merrick Garland on SCOTUS? And two more KBJs?
RBG did America a giant favor by not retiring when Barack was POTUS.
Well, we must admit: Mitch McConnell made these decisions possible.
Good on ya, Mitch. Seriously.
It’s hard to get me worked up on the student loan forgiveness. I think I’ve mentioned this before but most of the people with those loans are upper middle class. One of the biggest tax payers is also the upper middle class and the federal government is the originator of most loans. So pretty much I expect what would happen is instead of the same people paying off their student loans directly via loan repayment they end up paying back more indirectly via taxes when they get real jobs. (Which given that they’re upper middle class don’t worry, they’ll eventually get one via connections.)
But the other thing that I’m reminded of is that I used to post on a pretty left wing site about 15 years ago. (I won’t mention the site.) Student loans came up there and I mentioned that I felt kind of ripped off by my university when it came to my “education”.(Long story short, they’re a research university. They made it REALLY obvious job one there for the professors was research. Undergrad education was way down the list.) I paid off my loan but felt at some level I shouldn’t have. Of course every person there thought I should be grateful and that it was only right that I pay. Yes, I guess the narrative hadn’t come along and I guess if I had said the same thing now they would dutifully say that yes, you shouldn’t have had to pay. (They’re a bunch of mindless shills.)
More bullshit income stream for lawyers. Who has the authority to forgive the debt? the President or Congress? Congress. Who has the power to assert their authority? Congress. Who refuses to assert their authority? Congress.
I suppose we’ll have to go through the whole legal chain again to challenge Biden’s newest scheme.
2024 Dem campaign; Pack The Court, it’s illegitimate anyway. The candidates, post Brandon, will be in competition to be the most extreme. Gavin the Gel, Frau Sturmfurher Whitmer, Fauxcahauntus, M1 Abrams?
om– Maybe Hunter will throw his hat in the Democrat ring– stranger things have happened.
Chases Eagles (7:42 pm) said:
“More bullshit income stream for lawyers. Who has the authority to forgive the debt? the President or Congress? Congress. Who has the power to assert their authority? Congress. Who refuses to assert their authority? Congress.”
And which branch of our wonderful government is in imminent danger of being controlled lock-stock-barrel (permanently?) by lunatic leftists?
Someone at LinkedIn (a lawyer) was arguing that the website-designer precedent will invalidate the various state laws that prohibit social media companies from censoring posts that they don’t like. Interesting thought, but I’m not sure it’s right.
That the Democrats are crying like spoiled brats on the student loan forgiveness ruling by “demonizing” Republicans AND the Justices doesn’t surprise me. They are just playing to their base – spoiled Democrat voters who expect everyone else to pay for them.
The most interesting aspect of the student loan case is “standing.” The Court ought to revisit the issue. Perhaps I’m ill-informed, but Biden’s plan to unilaterally spend $400 billion of taxpayer money (and if they’re fessing up to $400 billion, the real number will probably be closer to $1 trillion) to give a gift to his base usurps the power of the purse from the Congress.
But current standing rules limit the ability of the Congress to sue. This strikes me as wrong–if the executive can do whatever it wants without statutory authority (or with imagined statutory authority as in the student loan case), we’re on the road to tyranny.
But if Congress has standing to sue, how is that asserted? Would it require a majority vote? If so, whenever the president has a majority in Congress willing to go along with his theft of power, the Congress couldn’t sue. This would enable Congress to avoid having to vote for giving away free stuff (I suspect that student loan forgiveness is very popular with the people getting the free money, but very unpopular with “Joe the Plumber”). I suspect that the vast majority of Democrat congress members are in favor of giving away money to their base, but they would hate to have to vote to do so. Of course, this doesn’t explain why the House didn’t vote to challenge the giveaway and force the Court to re-address standing on separation of power issues.
And of course, if any individual congress member had standing to sue, the floodgates would open and any Sheila Jackson Lee or Maxine Waters or Hank Johnson could sue for anything at any time. This probably doesn’t make sense.
Perhaps a “majority of the out of control party” rule would enable the party not controlling the executive branch to challenge separation of powers violations by the executive. This would be a safety valve to enable the judicial branch to referee disputes about the executive stealing power from the legislature. I suspect that quite a few Republicans had no desire to fight over the student loan giveaway–maybe that’s why Congress didn’t intervene–a few Republicans not showing up for the vote would have resulted in a lack of support for challenging the student loan giveaway.
This is all very complicated, but if Biden’s campaign gift to his base had been allowed to stand, we would have accelerated our already fast pace to banana republic status.
All in all, we have a very sorry political class. While the Republicans are obviously better than the Democrats, they cut and run from important issues at the drop of a hat.
Chad King @ 8:08: Interesting argument about standing and whether Congress can sue to stop a runaway Executive. But instead of wondering if Congress can sue, why not just get it to pass a law that effectively enjoins the runaway behavior and specifically empowers enumerated individuals to enforce the law? Then the Executive would be hit with a swarm of litigants…? (I should know the answer here and I just don’t.)
Of course, any and all actions by the legislative and judicial branches would be vulnerable to the executive branch just ignoring them. “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Etc.
the website-designer precedent will invalidate the various state laws that prohibit social media companies from censoring posts that they don’t like. Interesting thought, but I’m not sure it’s right.
IANAL, but I don’t see the same issue here: social media platforms’ removing content created by others is not the same thing as social media platforms’ users’ coercing the platforms to produce content with which they disagree. If I went over to BoingBoing and tried to force Cory Doctorow (he’s the one who runs that site, isn’t he?) to write an anti-abortion post, then he could refuse.
I know that’s a blog, not a “platform.” I used it as an example because blogs actually do produce content, that’s pretty much the primary thing they do, whereas “platforms” wanted to be treated like common carriers (even though I know Facebook, for instance, must have a content-producing team), which properly made them have to publish pretty much all comers. They wanted that because they didn’t want to be liable for the consequences of anything one of their users posted – a user doxxing someone leading to someone’s harming that person – but along with the benefit of being released from that risk comes the requirement that they not engage in viewpoint censorship.
Do I have that right?
The student loan programs were a way to shove billions into the Democrat- run universities, and so to pay them more for student indoctrination, cranking out millions of students who favor socialism (that’s 40%, last I looked) over grubby capitalism, and will remain Democrat voters forever. That’s why Pappa Biden wished to eliminate loan payback.
The Democratic Party is headed towards communism.
Jamie @ 1:54: “…Do I have that right?” I’m no expert but that’s my understanding of the reasoning behind Section 230: if you want immunity for what gets posted by others, you can’t edit or cherry-pick. Common carrier means you carry all comers, at least where they are not breaking the law.
Owen @ 1:11PM. I agree that a statute outlining standing to challenge an out-of-control executive would be ideal. But you need a majority of the House and 60 Senators to even send the bill to the President–I doubt if Biden (or any other Democrat) would ever sign such a law.
I was wondering about options when there’s an out-of-control President and a House that is unable to unite enough to bring the lawsuit as an institution. It just strikes me as bad policy that Congress is faced with the choice of having a majority agree to sue for a separation of powers issue–and even suing may require a change in governing law to confer standing on the complaining congress critters.
The proper response from the USSC would be “This is a dispute between the political branches and Congress has ample powers to bring the Executive into line. Go away and do your jobs.”
Congress may theoretically have the power, but they don’t have the will and they aren’t united.
State legislatures have long been willing to let somebody else (i.e. the federal government) make all the major decisions.
I wonder if that’s true of Congress as well now, of if it’s just that in a 50-50 country there isn’t much that Congress can do.
There isn’t much the Congress can do when they keeping giving up their major cards for little or nothing. It is almost like they don’t want the power just the perks.