I don’t agree that President Trump’s use of DoD funds to build a wall was wrong. The Constitution makes clear in Article 4 § 4 the requirement to protect the states from invasion, and if hoards of illegal aliens coming into the country doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what would.

On CNN of all places…………

Why the Supreme Court got it right on student loans

 Ilya Somin is a professor of law at George Mason University, the Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and the author of “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration and Political Freedom.” 

In a lawsuit brought by six state governments, the Supreme Court on Friday ruled that President Joe Biden’s massive $430 billion student loan forgiveness plan is illegal because it was never authorized by Congress, and the Constitution gives Congress – not the president – the power to determine how federal funds are spent. The court made the right decision: If the administration had won, Biden and future presidents would have been empowered to use vague statutes to usurp Congress’ constitutional control over the federal budget. Moreover, because of the context for this case, it also would have allowed the president to abuse emergency powers for partisan ends.

But the Biden administration was relying on a provision of the act that gives the secretary of education authority to “waive or modify” federal student loan requirements in order to ensure that recipients of financial assistance who have been affected by a national emergency “are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance” because they were affected by the emergency. The administration claimed beneficiaries of the loan-forgiveness plan qualified because they have been negatively affected financially as a result of the Covid-19 national emergency declared by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020.

The Supreme Court on Friday rightly ruled that the HEROES Act’s language comes nowhere near authorizing such a massive loan forgiveness plan. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained in the majority opinion, “The authority to ‘modify’ statutes and regulations allows the Secretary to make modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, not transform them.” The word “waive” also doesn’t give the government the power to forgive loans on a massive scale, because, as Roberts noted, the government conceded that the term “waiver” as used in the HEROES Act cannot refer to waiving loan repayments.

Another key issue in the case was whether the states challenging the program had “standing” to sue, which requires them to have suffered an injury as a result of the loan forgiveness plan. The court rightly ruled that Missouri, at least, had standing because it has a state-created student-loan servicer that stands to lose revenue if some of the loans it processes are forgiven. An injury to that entity is an injury to the state, because it’s a public corporation “created” and under to control of the state, and a “part of the Government itself.”

The court also rightly ruled that the administration’s ultra-broad interpretation of the HEROES Act ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent on the “major questions” doctrine. The doctrine requires Congress to “speak clearly” when authorizing an executive branch agency to exercise “decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” In other words, if the statute is ambiguous, courts must presume that Congress didn’t give the agency the power the agency is trying to claim.

While the major questions doctrine has been criticized by some commentators, it is an application of the common-sense principle that a large-scale delegation of power requires more clarity than a narrow one. Barrett made a similar point in her concurrence, noting that “commonsense principles of communication” lead us to expect greater clarity when delegating very broad authority to an agent. A legal document authorizing a contractor to “repair and upgrade” a house is reasonably interpreted to give her the power to replace a broken door but not to tear the house down and build a new one – even if a clever lawyer could potentially interpret the latter as just a type of “upgrade.”

The major questions doctrine helps guard against the executive usurpation of congressional power that could occur if the White House could use vague statutory language to enact sweeping policies that otherwise could never have gotten through Congress. In a dissenting opinion for the three liberal justices, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the HEROES Act must be interpreted expansively in order to give presidents flexibility during emergencies. But Roberts rightly rejected such a “grant [of] unlimited power.”

Presidents of both parties can be tempted to use emergency powers as a pretext to enact policies they otherwise can’t pass. In 2019, Trump used a dubious emergency declaration to try to divert Pentagon funds to build a wall along the southern border. Trump’s emergency declaration was bogus, and the statutes he cited didn’t give him the power to transfer military funds. His diversion could have set a dangerous precedent.

Biden’s abuse of emergency powers, like Trump’s before it, would likely have caused more harm than good. His student loan forgiveness plan would have been a waste of taxpayer funds when the US is already facing a looming fiscal crisis, a regressive policy in that it helps the relatively affluent (former college students) and potentially inflationary by infusing vast amounts of additional cash into the economy.