Oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Tuesday in a much-watched student loan forgiveness case, Biden v. Nebraska, pitted two of the conservative majority's beloved legal doctrines against one another.
The case for striking down President Joe Biden's program, which would forgive about $400 billion in federal student loan obligations, turns on the court's recently minted "major questions" doctrine. That doctrine, whose legal provenance is questionable and whose contours are still very much being worked out, holds that for "major" questions of "vast economic or political significance," the court requires a clear statement of congressional intent rather than deferring to executive branch interpretations of the law.
In this case, given the undeniably large price tag of the forgiveness, the justices could employ their novel doctrine to find that the secretary of education lacked the authority to forgive up to $20,000 in federal loan obligations per debtor.
