Supreme Court Averts Constitutional Crisis on Student Loans

“Constitutional crisis” is not a term to throw around lightly, but the Supreme Court averted one today with its rulings on student loans.

The Court took two cases challenging the constitutionality of the Department of Education’s student-loan “forgiveness” program. In Department of Education v. Brown, it ruled that the petitioner lacked standing to bring the case, so in that instance it did not rule on whether the program was constitutional.

The Biden administration structured the program such that it would be difficult to find a petitioner with standing to challenge it. It is obviously unconstitutional for the secretary of education to unilaterally spend hundreds of billions of dollars. We all know that, even people who are currently pretending that they don’t. The only question was whether someone would have legal standing to get the constitutional issue before the Supreme Court.

There was real concern that nobody in the country had standing, as I wrote last year. If that had been true, the administration would have unconstitutionally spent hundreds of billions of dollars on election-year vote-buying and gotten away with it on a technicality.

Fortunately, in the other case, Biden v. Nebraska, the Court ruled that the petitioners did have standing. From there, adjudicating the constitutional question was easy. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, walked through exactly how and why Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona had overstepped the strictures of the Constitution and statutes.

As I wrote last year, Cardona deserves to be impeached for his willful lawlessness. The secretary’s office produced a specious legal opinion justifying the program, then changed the program on the fly, sometimes by simply editing websites, to dodge legal challenges. Cardona demonstrated blatant contempt for the Constitution and the oath he swore to uphold it, and nearly got away with it on the technicality of standing.

Now that the program has been ruled unconstitutional, it actually strengthens the case to impeach Cardona. With the Supreme Court removing any doubt as to his lawless behavior, for Congress to press forward with impeachment would be a healthful reassertion of its power over the executive.

It was Congress’s constitutional spending powers that Cardona sought to usurp. Congress should use impeachment, one of its constitutional checks on the executive branch, to discipline the education secretary. Searching for holes in standing doctrine through which to push an unconstitutional policy is conduct that should not go unpunished, even if the Supreme Court doesn’t allow the policy to stand.

There are other reasons to impeach Cardona as well, as I outlined in that November article. It’s unlikely to happen, but regardless, it is a relief that the Supreme Court struck down the student-loan program. If it turned out that manipulating legal standing was an effective way to flagrantly violate the Constitution, we would have been facing a constitutional crisis.