One Of The Big Questions From The Biden Student Loan Supreme Court Hearing Is Standing — Here's Why
The Supreme Court this week heard oral arguments over President Biden's sweeping student loan forgiveness program. Can you break down what we need to know? Yeah, so I think a lot of borrowers are we're looking at the Supreme Court and are waiting with bated breath on whether that student loan forgiveness is going to happen or not. And yesterday's or earlier this week's oral arguments really highlighted where the Supreme Court stood. A lot of the justices had questions on standing, which is, should these lawsuits even proceed? And some of them were like, well, regardless of standing, should student loan forgiveness happen? I think a lot of borrowers need to realize though, we still have a couple months to go. So it does take about 60 days or so before the Supreme Court delivers their verdict. And that's when we'll know for sure whether, you know, student loan forgiveness is going to happen or not. So we still have about two months of waiting to do.
And definitely a waiting game. I'm sure all borrowers are holding their breath right now. But I want to talk more about standing, like you said, based on what you've heard in the oral arguments, does it sound like the parties who are suing have standing? It's very tough to say. So there's two takes that I kind of have on this, you know, the standing arguments that the parties brought are kind of a stretch. You know, it's not clear cut. It's not for sure. However, it's important for people to realize that standing is just a Supreme Court precedent.
It's not a law. It's not a rule. And the Supreme Court can kind of say, well, we're not going to care about that in this case, and we're going to rule. So we saw that earlier with some other big landmark decisions, for example, Roe versus Wade, another one where the court kind of took past standing issues, pushed them to the side and said, hey, you know, or sorry, past president issues, pushed them to the side and said, hey, we're going to ignore president. We're going to change the rules. And this is what we're going to do. So I do have a hunch that we might see something like that with the Supreme Court.
They could say, we're going to ignore some of the past rules around standing. We're going to create some new rules because this has some very major implications. And Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts hinted at that, that maybe we should reconsider standing for this case and maybe how we think about standing in general. Why do you think this current makeup of the court appears to care less about standing than maybe Supreme Court justices in the past? I think it's important to remember in this case per se, you know, it's not necessarily about the student loan forgiveness. I know a lot of borrowers have a personal connection to this, but really this is a kind of separation of powers issue is does the president have these powers? Does Congress has these powers? What are the powers of the Supreme Court? So I actually really think this is more of a, you know, case surrounding some of the really key tenants of our democracy and what the different parties can do. And yes, I feel like student loan borrowers are kind of stuck in the middle of this and they want to get their student loans forgiven. But there's a lot of bigger questions here that really could impact the future on a lot of different fronts.
What are some of those bigger questions? How will this shape the course of the foreseeable future? Well, I think the real question is, is what can be done during emergencies? So, you know, does the president really just have blanket powers to do all kinds of stuff during emergencies or do we really need to rely on Congress for these? And then there's the question of when does the court step in? So, you know, can the court just, you know, ignore some of these standing issues to step into some of these constitutional issues? And again, I think the student loan borrowers kind of get stuck in the middle with this specific case, which is kind of a bummer. But, you know, there are other issues here at play.