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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Biden has the power today to completely eliminate student loan debt via the 1965 higher education act. Alternatively, he could expand the Supreme Court to 13 or more justices to cancel out the conservative activist judges.
There are real actions Biden can take today to deliver on this supposed promise. And yet, the same bad dude who brought us legislation to ensure you can’t be rid of student loan debt via bankruptcy, somehow can’t come up with a way to get this job done. Hmm. Meme checks out.
Well let's look at the two you just said.
1:elimate via 1965 higher education act. Mechanistically, this would be done via executive order, then the court challenges, and rules on whether or not the action itself or the 1965 act is constitutional. And what do you know! We are in luck! Because that's literally what just fucking happened with the 10k cancellation last year. And it turns out our supreme court is full of shit bags, so it got squashed.
2: stack the court, or, excuse me, "expand to 13". This is blatantly and laughably unconstitutional. The amount of justices is explicitly set Article III, Section 1, by congress. Judiciary Act of 1789 set it to 6. Passed by congress. Judiciary Act of 1801 set it to 5. Congress. 1807 to 7. Congress. 1869 set to 9. Congress. Jackson tried and got overturned. FDR tried, via congressional bill and didn't get the votes. Now tell me where in that timeline do you see the authority to do this without congressional approval? So what you are asking for is a literal goddamn executive coup, a blatant authoritarian power grab for the executive, what we just narrowly avoided with Trump. Any support online you see for this movement, that even dares to cite a legal explanation for why Biden could do this, is made by liars and grifters who thinks they can sneakily interpret the constitution with some backdoor logic to ignore all judicial precedent. They are just rebranding sovereign citizen logic, straight up.
I don’t think SC has as much wiggle room to justify a squash attempt under 1965 HEA, the law is written very plainly there.
You’re right about executive overreach though, Biden would have to rally his congress to resize the court. He could have leveraged the majority activists handed him via GA in his first 2 years to do this. And when certain scumbag senators refuse to play ball, campaign aggressively in their home districts against them - whatever he has to do to fight for us. Which he isn’t going to do at all.
rofl
You think a bunch of republican "I'm a hair's breadth away from taking my gun and shooting the first black man I see" dumbasses will suddenly vote Democrat if you just "campaign aggressively"??
Obviously not, I was referring to those who claim to be part of the democratic caucus and yet obstruct just as much as the republicans. The convenient excuses to not get anything done by Dems - Manchin and Sinema. One of the ways Biden can prove to me he actually wants to do something to benefit the people, is to hold them accountable. Instead he rewards them, and I suspect this is because they’re doing their jobs perfectly.
However, you do bring up a good point - we need to seriously consider how to bring republican voters back from the brink. It will be crucial for us to find a way to de-program them and bring them back into the societal fold, if we are to survive as a nation.
I mean, the SC shut him down on eliminating debt. So they clearly don't believe he has the ability according to that act. It's not like he forgot to invoke a law or something. SC takes all laws into account.
Increasing the SC is a very dangerous move. What's going to happen? Just the SC increases every single time the majority changes and a new party comes into power?
So it's not that simple. It's an extremely naive take.
Are you familiar with the HEROES act from 2003? This is specifically what Biden and his legal team were relying upon for their recent attempt at student loan forgiveness. SC isn’t going to throw them a bone and try to broadly interpret other laws to support their case, that’s the attorney’s job which is supposed to be done at the time of filing. The 1965 law is different, and gives the executive absolute authority to cancel student loan debt. Which is why Biden didn’t invoke it.
In terms of restructuring the court, yes it is a dangerous precedent, but the strategy here is to legitimately threaten it and get them to all of the sudden see reason, instead of having to follow through. This has been done successfully a few times throughout history in times when the court has overreached.
This is actually quite simple - Biden can use his power and influence to materially improve the lives of the financially enslaved student populace, and he is choosing not to. He will side with corporations every time, as he has done throughout his entire political career. Have you been paying attention?
SC is required to take all law into account as broadly as possible to support. They're legally required to "throw a bone." They can't say something is unconstitutional just because the wrong argument was used at the time. You can argue they don't know about it or didn't refer to it, but at this point, there's legal precedent so it very likely will not work.
Edit: when has the threat to expand the court worked?
Edit: and Dems don't have majority to expand the court anymore anyway
The endless march of court stacking would breed a not-inconsequential amount of bad precedence, to the degree that even judicial impeachment would produce a more stable final state. Iirc, supreme court stacking has been attempted before and struck down as well.
What the Democrats should have done is put forth a cap on the justice count while Republicans feel like winners. If they stack the court back, we'll just see SCOTUS grow every new administration until it's literally meaningless. The court shouldn't even be political. It is there to check runaway politics.
Not a terrible idea but we are in for some suffering for the duration of these younger heritage foundation appointees. This is the sad result of the dual party system, courts could never remain unbiased without a meaningful 3rd party represented in congress.
I would also propose term limits. A life prison sentence is 20 years, so why not a lifetime SC appointment capped at the same timeframe?
Hate to tell you that the highest judicial office is literally a political position.