Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action and Student Debt Relief: Impact on Blacks and the Poor

The Supreme Court of the United States makes decisions in the field of education that will penalize blacks and the poor. On Thursday, the institution dominated by conservative judges ended affirmative action against racial minorities in higher education. Then on Friday, she said no to the obliteration of much of the student debt by the federal government.

For President Biden, who had promised this amnesty during his electoral campaign in 2020, it is a terrible blow. Some 430 billion dollars of debt should have been canceled in about thirty years, out of a total of 1,600 billion (excluding non-federal debt). The 43 million debtors would have benefited from it: 20 million would have been released from their debt, and 23 million would have seen it melt from an average of 29,400 dollars to 13,600 dollars.

The reimbursement of monthly payments, which was suspended for three years due to the Covid crisis, must resume on September 1. This risks creating a series of payment incidents, and weighing on consumption and growth, as President Biden seeks to sell the success of his economic policy to win re-election.

Moratorium or erasure

According to the Court, the executive “usurped legislative power” by deciding to amnesty student debt without Congressional approval, as President John Roberts explained. To tell the truth, Joe Biden himself had trouble at first convincing himself that a regulatory text would be enough to erase 400 billion in debt.

The decision to go anyway was made a year ago, citing the post-September 11, 2001 Heroes Act. find themselves “less financially comfortable” because of this emergency, like the student debtors deprived of employment during the Covid. It does not specify whether the State must provide temporary (moratorium) or permanent (erasure) compensation.

This law allows the government “to ‘defer or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to Education Act financial assistance programs, not to rewrite them from scratch,” the court wrote in its decision. Three out of nine justices issued a dissenting opinion, the same as the day before – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, three women appointed by a Democratic president.

The “Extreme Court”

The plaintiffs put forward the case of students who preferred to work rather than go into debt to finance their studies, excluded from the largesse of Joe Biden. Several conservative states have also lodged a complaint because the debt wipeout was going to cause them to lose tax resources.

On the merits, the Court once again expresses its deep mistrust of the Federal State. A year ago, she distinguished herself by removing federal protection of the right to abortion in the United States. Polls show a drop in trust in the institution, sometimes dubbed the “Extreme Court”.

It did not, however, go so far as to support the daring theory of the “independent state legislature”. This would have been an institutional earthquake, as the judiciary would no longer be able to control electoral laws. This theory is championed by Trumpists who still do not recognize the 2020 election result.

Indeed, on Tuesday, the Court upheld the right of the North Carolina Supreme Court to invalidate a redesign of the locally voted electoral map. Two judges chosen by Bush senior, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, and a judge appointed by Donald Trump, Samuel Alito, expressed a dissenting opinion. For once, the dividing line between the nine judges passed in the middle of the conservative camp.

2023-06-30 15:46:48


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