Oh no! The Supremes are about to end the student loan grave train?

This is grossly unfair. If you borrowed money from the Federales to pay for college, you shouldn't have to pay it back because you didn't know what you were doing!

In fact, if you have a mortgage insured by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, you shouldn't have to pay that back either. Why? Again, because you didn't understand, you'd have to pay mortgage payments each month.

To be fair, you should be forgiven for not paying taxes. You had no idea the taxes were that high, or you wouldn't have worked in the first place. You absolutely would have elected to live on welfare, food stamps, and other federal programs for the indigent.

BTW the $430 billion is potential loan forgiveness comes out to about $5,000 per ever American household.

Supreme Court Signals Skepticism on Biden’s Effort to Forgive Student Debt

Chief justice questions program’s fairness to those without college loans

By Jess Bravin, WSJ

Updated Feb. 28, 2023 3:16 pm ET

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration’s plan to forgive student loans held by 40 million Americans faced a skeptical Supreme Court Tuesday, with conservative justices at times incredulous that federal law allowing the education secretary to provide emergency relief to borrowers could be read to wipe $430 billion from the Treasury’s books.

The administration apparently believes, said Justice Samuel Alito, that when it comes to handing out benefits, “a trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, doesn’t really make much difference to Congress,” adding that hardly seemed “very sensible.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch asked whether Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was outside his wheelhouse in putting forth a regulation with such an extensive economic impact. “I understand the secretary has considerable expertise when it comes to educational affairs, but in terms of macroeconomic policy, do we normally assume that every cabinet secretary—learned as they are—has that kind of knowledge?”

Liberal justices said that when Congress authorized the education secretary to respond to national emergencies by waiving or modifying legal provisions “applicable to the student financial assistance programs” so that borrowers weren’t worse off financially, debt cancellation obviously was part of the equation.

“Congress doesn’t get much clearer than that,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “We do congressional statutes every day that are really confusing. This one is not,” she said, referring to the program’s basis in a 2003 statute called the Heroes Act.

For its part, the Biden administration argued the issue shouldn’t have come before the court at all, because the six Republican-led states who filed one of the two cases argued Tuesday, as well as the two individual borrowers who brought the second, weren’t harmed by the debt-relief program and therefore lacked the legal standing to sue.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the government, said loan servicers that would lose revenue from debt forgiveness would have such standing. None actually challenged the program, she added, casting doubt on arguments that Missouri could sue on behalf of a state-affiliated student loan authority that distanced itself from the suit.

While the case centers on an interpretation of statute, the justices’ views of the underlying policy at times surfaced on Tuesday.

“There are 50 million students who will benefit from this,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Many of them don’t have assets sufficient to bail them out after the pandemic.” Addressing James Campbell, the Nebraska solicitor general representing the state plaintiffs, she said: “And what you’re saying is now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them,” rather than the secretary of education.

Chief Justice John Roberts highlighted the hardship that fell on those who hadn’t taken on student debt. Imagine, he said, a high-school graduate who borrowed money to set up a lawn-care business, while a classmate instead went to college on a student loan.

“We know statistically that the person with the college degree is going to do significantly financially better over the course of life than the person without, and then along comes the government and tells that person, you don’t have to pay your loan,” Chief Justice Roberts said. “Nobody is telling the person who is trying to set up the lawn-service business that he does not have to pay his loan,” he said, “even though his tax dollars are” subsidizing his classmate.

The justices’ divergent views of separation of powers, the constitutional structure that assigns specific roles to the legislative, executive and judicial branches, frequently was at issue.

“The case reminds me of the one we had a few years ago under a different administration”—that of former President Donald Trump—“that tried acting on its own to cancel the Dreamers program, and we blocked that effort,” Chief Justice Roberts said, referring to temporary protection from deportation for some young people who entered the country without authorization.

“We take very seriously the idea of the separation of powers and that power should be divided to prevent its abuse,” he said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that principle, rather than spurring the court to strike down the program, required the justices to sit the dispute out.

The principle of legal standing limits courts to disputes where the parties have a real stake, not just difference of opinion, she said.