Justice Roberts Rebukes Liberal Justices on Loan Dissent

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday took aim at the court’s liberal justices in a note at the end of his majority opinion striking down the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan debt relief plan, in response to Justice Elena Kagan’s strong rebuttal to the ruling.

Kagan, who wrote the dissent in the case, disagreed on its merits and whether the challengers to the Biden plan had the authority to file a lawsuit, saying the court “today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance,” reported The Hill.

Roberts, in his note at the end of the majority opinion, said that in recent times, “it has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.”

Kagan was joined in her dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and read portions of her document from the bench, which rarely occurs and signaled the significance of their disagreement.

Roberts, in his decision, noted that “reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis — in fact, at least three do.”

However, he said the court does not “mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement” and stressed that “it is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.”

Kagan has had a reputation for consensus building, but after the Dobbs decision that overrode the Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion, she has warned that the court is risking its legitimacy with some of its latest rulings.

“So in a case [that is] not a case, the majority overrides the combined judgment of the Legislative and Executive Branches, with the consequence of eliminating loan forgiveness for 43 million Americans,” she wrote in her dissent in the student debt case.

In its 6-3 decision Friday, with the court’s six conservative justices in the majority, the $400 billion plan announced by President Joe Biden is effectively dead, leaving borrowers likely to start being required to resume paying their student loan debts later this summer.

The court’s ruling held that the administration had to have the endorsement of Congress before embarking on the expensive program, and rejected arguments that a bipartisan law in 2003, the HEROES Act, gave the administration the power to forgive loans.

Under Biden’s program, the government would have canceled $10,000 in student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 or people in households with less than $250,000 in income. Pell Grant recipients would have had another $10,000 in student loan debts forgiven.