This is a good week for CNN.com. My most recent post lauded a fact-checking piece and now I’m going to write about a story last Tuesday which gives a good explanation of what I believe will be the basis of the Supreme Court’s decision on the student loan forgiveness cases — the challengers’ lack of standing.
In “The Supreme Court’s student loans case is about more than student loans,” CNN Supreme Court reporter Ariane de Vogue provides a good explanation of the concept of “standing,” which is a limit on the power of federal courts derived from the fact that the Article III, section 2, of the United States Constitution extends the judicial power of the United States only to “Cases” and “Controversies.”((I discussed standing in my November 17, 2022, post Texas Federal Court’s Dash to Invalidation of Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Program Likely to be Called Back for False Start.)) For once this is not a hidden opinion piece which introduces a hard-working American facing the impossible prospect of ever paying off student loans and leveraging that emotional appeal into an argument that the Supreme Court should uphold the program for one or another reason unrelated to the actual questions before the Court, with a detour to equate this program with PPP loan forgiveness.((See my August 29, 2022, post Thoughts About Student Loan Forgiveness.))
But, as its title indicates, the article is not just about the fate of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. It traces the recent expansion of State standing to Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), which allowed States to sue the Environmental Protection Agency to compel it to regulate greenhouse gases and led to a skyrocketing of “lawsuits brought by state attorneys general challenging actions by the federal government . . . with states making extravagant standing arguments.” Whether that’s good or bad depends upon who’s president.
Jay Bohn
February 2, 2023