In a Friday afternoon press conference, President Biden slumped over the lectern and delivered barely audible remarks vowing to keep fighting for student-loan relief, in the wake of the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling declaring his attempt to hand out $430 billion worth of debt cancellation was an unconstitutional exercise of executive power.
But I am not too worried about it. The Court made clear that the executive had very narrow authority to tinker with the student-loan program, but not the ability to scrap it altogether and replace it with a new program without going through Congress. This is true whether talking about the HEROES Act of 2003, which was the central part of today’s ruling, or the original Higher Education Act of 1965, which Biden has indicated would be the focus of upcoming executive action. To reach its decision, the Court also made clear that at least Missouri had standing to sue — which should hold in any future cases involving widespread debt cancellation.
In practice, what this means is that either Biden complies with the law, in which case he’ll be limited to making minor tweaks that he’ll tout as student-loan relief, or he’ll go full-speed ahead with a program of similar scale to his original program, in which case he’ll be smacked down by the Supreme Court again.