Here’s CNN, with what might be the worst attempt to convince the Supreme Court to ignore the law that I’ve ever seen from a major news outlet:
The fate of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program that would impact scores of borrowers from a wide array of colleges and socioeconomic backgrounds lies in the hands of nine relatively wealthy people who graduated from a short list of elite private schools.
When the Biden administration goes before the Supreme Court Tuesday to defend the program,which would offer up to $20,000 of federal student debt forgiveness to millions of qualified borrowers, they’ll be making their arguments to a small group of jurists who are far from being representative of the borrowers that could benefit from the relief.
Okay, and that has what to do with the standing and statutory questions that the Court will be considering tomorrow?
Some of the justices had financial assistance to help them attend school: Thomas received a scholarship from Holy Cross College to pay for his undergraduate degree there, while Sotomayor attended Princeton University and Yale Law School on scholarships. And they have come from different backgrounds with different politics. Thomas, for instance, grew up in poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, and is the court’s leading conservative justice.
And to be sure, students who took out federal loans for undergraduate programs at private schools could be eligible for the relief. In fact, those students took out more debt than their public school counterparts in recent years and at slightly higher rates, according to data from the College Board.
I’m still not seeing an argument.
In addition to their cozy government salaries, some of the justices have been paid handsomely through lucrative book deals or teaching gigs, according to their financial disclosures, which provide limited information about their finances, those of their spouses and various reimbursements for travel. Among that group is Sotomayor, Gorsuch and Barrett, who have all received over six figures in book royalties or publishing deals in recent years.
So . . . ?
Maybe the sole outside source quoted in the piece will provide a rationale?
“I think it’s fair to say that (the justices) didn’t live the experiences of the people that benefit from the president’s debt relief program. And it’s important for them to go into this case understanding the limits of their own life experience and how that might affect their ability to be impartial considering case,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, which urged the justices to uphold the relief program in a friend-of-the-court brief.
Oh.
It is, of course, not “fair to say” anything of the sort. It’s abject nonsense from start to finish. In fact, it’s worse than that: it’s cheating. The core question before the Court is whether the text of the 2003 HEROES Act permits the executive branch to cancel student loans during an emergency. That’s it. That’s the whole issue. The “life experience” of the people considering the question is completely irrelevant. What matters is whether the Article I branch has granted the power that the Article II branch is claiming. Everything else is fluff.
What Mike Pierce means when he talks about the justices’ “ability to be impartial” is that he does not want them to be impartial. If he wanted them to be impartial, he’d be arguing that the HEROES Act grants the statutory authority that the Biden administration is claiming, that there is an emergency that justifies that law’s invocation, and that the group that Biden has chosen for “relief” meets the required legal definitions. But Pierce can’t argue any of those things because they’re all transparently ridiculous and he knows it.
I should probably expect this from him. As a paid flack for deadbeats, it’s Pierce’s job to say whatever pops into his head. But what’s CNN’s excuse? It’s supposed to be a news network.
Oh, yeah.