Chief Justice John Roberts pounded away on the price tag – “about half a trillion dollars” – for the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program during oral arguments Tuesday. But as he repeatedly cited the big cost, he reinforced a broader, more familiar point that could further undercut executive power and enhance the Supreme Court itself.
Roberts was especially active in the center chair, asserting the court’s authority and his own, during a session that lasted three and a half hours. Now in his 18th term, Roberts has sometimes struggled to control his colleagues, the majority of whom reside to his ideological right but these cases afforded him a commanding presence in an area of the law he’s been driving.
The 68-year-old Roberts pressed an emerging “major questions doctrine,” embraced by the right and generally forbidding agency actions on matters of vast economic and political significance without clear authority from Congress.
He also showed an attitude toward basic policy choices, as he questioned the fairness of federal assistance for a student who had taken out a college loan, over someone who’d never had a college opportunity and instead started a lawn care service.
“Along comes the government and tells that person: You don’t have to pay your loan,” Roberts said of a hypothetical college loan borrower. “Nobody’s telling the person who is trying to set up the lawn service business that he doesn’t have to pay his loan. He still does, even though his tax dollars are going to support the forgiveness of the loan for the college graduate, who’s now going to make a lot more than him over the course of his lifetime.”
The cases tested whether a 2003 statute permitting the secretary of Education to “waive or modify” federal student loans in national emergencies could be used, in the wake of the…
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