Vladeck: The judge blocking student loan relief for millions is wrong about the law | CNN

Opinion: The judge blocking student loan relief for millions is wrong about the law | CNN

By Steve Vladeck (University of Texas)

CNN — 

The legal battles over President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief program heated up on Thursday, when the Fort Worth, Texas-based Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, struck down the program and issued a

nationwide injunction

purporting to block it across the country.

Biden’s program aims to provide eligible low- and middle-income borrowers $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness – or up to $20,000 if they also received a Pell grant while in college. Before the program was put on hold, it had already received 26 million applications.

Steve Vladeck

But for Pittman, the central problem with the program is that its sheer economic size required clearer authorization from Congress than that provided by the 2003 statute on which the executive branch is relying. Invoking the Supreme Court’s new and deeply contested “major questions doctrine,” Pittman’s ruling would, if left intact, make it impossible for the program to be rescued without Congress stepping in.

But the biggest problem with Pittman’s ruling isn’t its substance; it’s why he allowed the case to be brought in the first place. Every other challenge to the Biden program that’s been brought thus far (and there have been a bunch) have been thrown out by trial courts for lack of standing – the term courts use as a shorthand for whether the dispute before them is the kind of controversy over which the Constitution allows them to exercise judicial power.

In a nutshell, a case’s standing has three elements: That the plaintiff shows an “injury in fact”; that the injury is “fairly traceable” to the defendant’s allegedly wrongful conduct; and that the courts are able to provide at least some redress for their injuries.

Although standing is a technical doctrine, it’s also an important one. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a 2007 opinion, “No principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government.”

Basically, the idea is that it’s not the federal courts’ job to answer hypothetical questions or resolve policy disputes. Only if a party can show how they’ve been harmed by the challenged policy in a manner that is concrete and particularized – real and discrete – will they (usually) be allowed to challenge it.

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