Aaron M. Sprecher via AP
On Wednesday, former students with college debts lost again, thanks to the Trump Supreme Court. The Court refused an administration request to allow one of President Biden’s several executive efforts to reduce or suspend debt to take effect, pending a lower court review.
The specific measure was the SAVE program, Biden’s version of an income-driven repayment system where monthly payments are tied to income and balances are forgiven after a set number of years. IDR has been in place in America for 30 years; only under Biden has it been challenged in the courts. This is only one of several Biden efforts to provide debt relief, affecting millions of beleaguered students, that the Supreme Court has stymied.
In addition, the Court has blocked executive actions expanding labor rights. It has, of course, overturned Roe v. Wade; and most recently a district court in Texas, the preferred route for conservatives to seek nationwide injunctions, blocked a Biden program aimed at preventing deportation of undocumented spouses of legal immigrants. And a great deal more.
All of this is the result of Trump’s appointees to the Court, as well as his district and circuit court picks in conservative areas. They all usually vote as a bloc, less and less as conservative jurists and more and more as partisan hacks.
Kamala Harris needs to make the Trump Court a much bigger issue in the election, not just for its trashing of American democracy but for the way the Court has blocked concrete benefits for ordinary Americans, as in the case of student debt relief.
The most appalling instance of partisan hackery was the Court’s holding that the president is literally above the law, in the aptly named Trump v. United States, a ruling not based on any constitutional principle but expediently intended to shelter the current president from criminal prosecution.
As recently as 2018, before the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court was divided along liberal/conservative lines, but not strictly partisan ones. Libertarian conservatives occasionally delivered surprises, as in the case of upholding same-sex marriage in the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges. The sheer opportunism and hypocrisy of the pre-Trump Court were largely limited to the three far-right justices at the time, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia, occasionally joined by the nimble Chief Justice John Roberts.
Today, however, thanks to Trump, the Court is one more partisan operation. And if Trump is elected, it will be even more so.
Some of the rulings that harm ordinary citizens and help corporations are arcane, such as the overturning of the Court’s traditional deference to administrative rulemaking in the June 2024 case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. But many other harmful rulings are clear to ordinary people without a law degree.
The Court’s corruption as a partisan operation did not begin with Trump. It began with the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore, in which the Court, on a largely party-line vote of 5-4, intervened to block a statewide recount in Florida that would have likely resulted in Al Gore being certified as the winner and president-elect.
In that case, the Court invented a doctrine out of whole cloth, holding that the recount would have deprived citizens of different Florida counties of their due process rights under the 14th Amendment, since counties had different standards. (In fact, a statewide recount would have enhanced such rights, by ensuring that every ballot was counted based on a uniform standard.) So embarrassed were the justices by their contrivance that they actually added that their ruling was unique to this case and should have no value as precedent.
After 2000, justices appointed by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama led to a Court divided between liberals and conservatives, but one that was not wholly partisan. But with Trump’s three appointees, the Court has become an arm of the Republican administration, to the benefit of Trump personally, the harm of regular citizens, and the degradation of one of America’s most valued institutions.
The corruption of the Court, and its effect on ordinary Americans, deserves much more attention in the election.
