Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
We will soon find out whether the Supreme Court’s successive lurches toward far-right dogmatism are becoming even more outlandish and transparently opportunist. Tomorrow, the high court will hear oral arguments on President Biden’s plan to cancel up to $10,000 in debt for those with incomes below $125,000, with extra relief for those who received Pell grants.
It’s a great way of targeting debt relief. But Republican state officials sued last October to block the plan, as the Prospect has reported.
The immediate issue before the Court is whether the plaintiffs have standing, since their contention is that they would be harmed by the relief program. How would they be harmed? The individual litigants claim that while others will get relief, they won’t. That is supposed to count as harm. And the state officials contend that they have standing because the federal government provides other forms of state aid.
To say that these are far-fetched arguments is an understatement. Yet this case is before the Supreme Court because lower courts packed with Trump appointees have blocked Biden from proceeding. With this Court, almost any invention is possible.
Even more ominous is another case where the Court has just agreed to review a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that would put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau out of business on the grounds that its funding mechanism is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. The sponsors of the CFPB, which was part of the Dodd-Frank Act, deliberately put its funding inside the Federal Reserve (which doesn’t rely on annual appropriations) to give it some political insulation.
If the high court were to find this brand of agency funding unconstitutional, it could shutter not only the CFPB, but several other agencies with independent funding, including Social Security, Medicare, and the Federal Reserve itself, as well as financial agencies such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC.
In short, a ruling in this case upholding the Fifth Circuit finding could wreck a good chunk of the administrative state—a long-standing goal of the far right. Would this Supreme Court really do that? I’d put nothing past it.
Should the Democrats take back the House, the idea of expanding the Court looks more and more reasonable.
