Last November I wrote about the Northern District of Texas’ ruling in Brown v. U.S. Department of Education which found President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan unlawful. In order reach the point where it could issue a decision on the merits, the court had to conclude that the plaintiffs in that case had standing to bring the suit in the first place, which was a problem other opponents of student loan forgiveness had not been able to overcome. I believed that the Brown plaintiffs also had not established their own standing and it was my expectation that the decision would be reversed on that basis by the Fifth Circuit.
The court of appeals never got the chance to decide the case because the Supreme Court issued a rare writ of certiorari before judgment so that it could review the decision in conjunction with Biden v. Nebraska, a case in which the Eastern District of Missouri had ruled that the six plaintiff states in that matter – Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina – did not have standing but where the Eight Circuit nevertheless issued an injunction against the program pending appeal.
I firmly believed that the Supreme Court would find that neither set of plaintiffs had standing, which would render the student loan forgiveness program unreviewable.
Well, I was half right. Justice Alito wrote a unanimous opinion in Brown which rejected the plaintiffs claim of standing and so vacated the district court’s decision and remanded with directions to dismiss the case.
However, in Biden v. Nebraska the Court (by a vote of 6 to 3) held that Missouri, at least, had standing to bring its challenge. On the merits the Court, by the same vote, ruled that the HEROES Act does not give the Secretary of Education the power to create the broad-based student loan forgiveness program,1 a position with which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once noted her agreement.
- I have not had the opportunity to read either Brown or Biden v. Nebraska in full (lots of opinions were issued in the last couple of weeks.) ↩︎