SCOTUS kills Biden's student loan/debt relief plan...

Wen I went to UF in 96 i think I paid $65 a credit hour for graduate level classes. DBCC at the same time was about $30 if I recall.

Currently Daytona state is 102/hr for AA/AS
Vo tech 82/hr
BS degree 120/hr.

plenty of options that haven’t gone through the roof.

 

Ur Probly right. I know what they are now cause my daughter goes there. I was trying to remember what they were but I thought I paid like 12-1500 a semester on my credit card. Then worked that semester and wiped it out.

 

I said this up thread.

The could drop the interest and save borrowers thousands.

Not sure what the rates were when the fed funds rates were near zero

 

Well, I agree on the first point. That said, my only personal/anecdotal data points come from UF (uber cheap), North Texas (uber cheap), and UMinnesota (not cheap, but has frozen tuition about half of the last 12 years). I just don't think state schools are in any way a culprit and further, making them cheaper would compromise the budgets, which are already strapped.

I hear you in principle on gov interest, but to my previous point, the gov loans are by far the best deal. Why not get the best deal, while also putting back into the public "kitty" so to speak? It's optimistic thinking, but I'd rather the gov, which MIGHT reinvest in the citizenry, get that interest than a loan shark.

 

Well, I'd say the government by not charging interest is investing in the citizenry.
(To be clear, I'm not advocating for the government to leave the market. I'm advocating that they continue to make the loans, but they don't charge interest.)

 

The law doesn’t permit the President to waive student loans. The President is not required to respect the Supreme Court, he is required to obey them.

 

Uhmmmm, not a single one of those Presidents spent a penny of our country’s money to create our debt. They may have signed the check, but Congress drafted the budget and told the President where to sign.

 

to respond to both you and @gator_lawyer , I’m not a lawyer so I can’t compete on legal arguments but these days for the most part everybody decides what position they support then cherry pick a legal construct to support it anyways.

It is possible a law could be created for a specific situation, that seems perfectly reasonable, and is never challenged. Then, decades later, the law is used in an unanticipated and grandiose way that is problematic, such as wiping out trillions of debt. By any level of common sense, having an executive to just expend trillions of dollars, unilaterally, with a stroke of a pen gives the executive branch entirely more power that was likely constitutionally intended. Congress can’t necessarily legislate away its powers. The line item veto was overturned in the 90s.

From my perspective just wiping away trillions of debt unilaterally is irresponsible and not a power a president should unilaterally have. Seems like common sense. Now leave it to lawyers and SCOTUS justices to construct a plausible legal argument to support the reasonable position. That’s the way it works these days.

 

The President doesn't unilaterally have that power. He has that power because Congress gave it to him. That's the issue. You're saying, "Well, this is an unintended consequence of a law Congress passed." I agree. But the legal question isn't whether the text of the statute empowers the President to do things Congress didn't think of when they passed the law. The legal question is whether the law Congress passed authorizes the President to do what he did. And it unequivocally does.

If Congress doesn't like the unintended consequences, it can amend the statute and narrow it. If the people don't like what the President did, they can vote him out. We have elections and legislation to solve those problems. It is not the judiciary's role to decide that Congress didn't mean what it said and rewrite the statutes themselves. And that only looks all the worse when these same Republicans gave Trump the greenlight to use the same "loophole" to divert funding Congress allocated elsewhere to his "wall" (after Congress refused to give him that funding for his "wall").

 

Do you think SCOTUS was wrong to overrule the line item veto congress gave the Clinton administration in the 90s? Conceptually I can see that there are constitutional limits as to what congress can just hand over to the executive branch. Imagine what is going on in the FL legislature with DeSantis, except on a national level.

 

It's a tougher call because the issue there isn't so much the delegation of power, it's the Constitution's bicameralism and presentment requirements. My shoot-from-the-hip perspective is that if Congress in a law allowed the President to use line-item vetoes for only that specific law, I'd say it's constitutional. A statute allowing him to use line-item vetoes to future laws would be unconstitutional. But if you asked me to pick one side in that case (dissent or majority), I agree with the dissent more than the majority.

 

Sadly like 5 trillion of Trump’s debt was due to covid, but you ignore that. If Hilary had been President it would have been. The entire country would have been locked down.

 

Interesting enough many of our more left leaning and right leaning members have seem to have found some common ground in this thread…

 

More accurately it wasn't liberal arts colleges that popped up, but the private for pay colleges that sprung up sucking in students at absurd prices, promising great riches and providing little in the way of an education, leaving them with debt they couldnt pay.

 

Well the risk premium is already much higher for today's students. I graduated in the late 70s with a 3% Federal loan. Similar loans are significantly higher (5-7% last I looked) than that now at a time when the general level of interest rates is much lower.

 

The possibility of laws being used in unintended ways is an ever present issue, but one for Congress to solve by being more specific in what they want to happen.

I’d also point out that while Congress perhaps didn’t envision this particular application of the authority, the fact that they made such a broad delegation makes it clear that they wanted the president to have full flexibility to decide, in his best judgment, what form of relief would be appropriate under the circumstances. Take, for example, the extreme possibly of a nuclear war—certainly a worry in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria over Iraq’s (non-existent) WMDs. That was the context this law was passed in. Is it really hard to believe Congress meant to give the president the ability to waive all students loans if the worst were to happen? Their words, via the law they passed, says that they did intend to give that authority, so why not believe them?

Now, delegations of authority can certainly be abused, and this might be one of those examples. However, the way our government is supposed to function is the voters decide if the president went too far, not the court system.

And this is by no means unique to student loan forgiveness. The president has many awesome, completely unilateral powers. He could pardon and order released every single federal prisoner with the stroke of a pen. He could publish our most closely guarded secrets on WhiteHouse.gov. He could fire a nuclear missile at Beijing and usher in the apocalypse. Right or wrong, we put our trust in one person to make these decisions. The fact that they are consequential is true, but in no way suggests that we didn’t actually give the president the power.

Last, your point that everyone makes their arguments based on their political persuasion is largely true, but exemplifies the problem. Judges are supposed to be (and swear to be) neutral, but we’re seeing them be anything but. They are acting as lawyers for their respective political parties. That sort of thing can’t last. Their authority only extends as far as people believe they are actually trying to make the legally right ruling. Fewer and fewer people believe that every year, and it’s just a matter of time before a president decides that he doesn’t need to listen to them anymore.

 

Could he make an assumptive declassification of documents by taking them to his residence as he was departing? Seems to pale in comparison to all of which you mentioned above.

 

Seems to me there is a limit to what powers congress can give up. If a sycophant Republican Party congress decides to allow Donald Trump to pass his own laws by himself clearly that is a problem.

 

Only Congress can pass laws. But Congress can pass laws that delegate huge swaths of authority to the Executive. There's nothing in the Constitution that prohibits it. If you think that's bad policy, we're mostly in agreement. But that's an issue for elections and the legislative process. The job of the judiciary is to provide a fair legal system and protect our rights, not to prevent the people governing from doing unwise things.