The Supremes: Student Debt

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Supreme Court Building, exterior

Following its tradition of recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States spent the last few weeks of June releasing its most controversial decisions of the term. It then adjourned for its usual three-month vacation. This is part of a series of posts analyzing those decisions.

On the last day of the term the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Biden v. Nebraska that the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan was unconstitutional. The plan, which would have forgiven up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers with incomes below $125,000, was based on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act (HEROES Act), a 2003 law that allows the government to provide relief to recipients of student loans during a national emergency.

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The Supremes: LGBTQ

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Supreme Court Building, exterior

Following its tradition of recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States spent the last few weeks of June releasing its most controversial decisions of the term. It then adjourned for its usual three-month vacation. This is part of a series of posts analyzing those decisions.

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority did not end its assault on precedent with its new rules on abortion last term and affirmative action in the term just ended. In the eight years since the court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the right to marry is a fundamental right guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment the surviving dissenters in that case, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts have been plotting revenge. Thomas, in his concurrence to last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health opinion stripping American women of their reproductive rights explicitly invited a fresh challenge to Obergefell.

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The Supremes: Affirmative Action

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Supreme Court Building, exterior

Following its tradition of recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States spent the last few weeks of June releasing its most controversial decisions of the term. It then adjourned for its usual three-month vacation. This is the first of a series of posts analyzing those decisions.

Continuing its steady march back to the 19th Century, the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court has effectively ended affirmative action on the basis of race in college admissions, a policy used for more than 40 years to make campuses more diverse. The two schools at the center of this decision, Harvard, America’s oldest private university, and the University of North Carolina, the oldest public one, had programs considered the gold standard in affirmative action plans.

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The Fourth

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Declaration of Independence

I find myself still reeling from last week’s end of the term opinion dump by the Supreme Court, the conservative supermajority continuing its steady march back to the 19th century. Like last year’s disaster, this year will require a series of blogs assessing the damage. That will come on the other side of the Independence Day holiday.

For today I pass along two recommended references. The first, Professor Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College’s brilliant, as always, substack on the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence. If you don’t already subscribe to Professor Richardson’s “Letters from an American” you should.

And second, the wonderful film of the wonderful Broadway Musical, “1776“.

Both remind me of our struggle to form “a more perfect union.” And how we must continue that struggle in the face of headwinds that at times like these seem insurmountable.

Happy Fourth of July.

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Trump and Nixon

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Yes, this is Donald Trump and Richard Nixon. The photograph was taken at the Westin Galleria March 11, 1989, at a fundraising event, Houston High Society’s Party of the Year. Nixon would have been about 76 years old. He had resigned the presidency fifteen years earlier. Trump would be about 43 years old, working on building his empire. Trump had been courting the disgraced Nixon at least since 1983 when he invited Nixon to move into Trump Tower in Manhattan, where Trump lived. A series of letters between the two, previously unknown, was revealed to the public by the Nixon Foundation just two years ago.

A footnote is appropriate here. The image Donald Trump paints of himself as a self-made, tremendously wealthy, successful businessman has always been a fraud. That Donald Trump is a fictional character created as the star of the NBC television program, The Apprentice. The image was crafted by television producer Mark Burnett in 2004 and promoted heavily by NBC under the guidance of then CEO Jeff Zucker. That character never existed.

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Trump and Ellsberg

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I was researching a column on the connection between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon when the news broke, Daniel Ellsberg had died at the age of ninety-two. The report was not a surprise. In March, Ellsberg had announced that he had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. He had been, in recent weeks, giving a series of interviews recapping the tumultuous events that made his name a household word in the 1970s and warning that those events continue to have relevance today.

Ellsberg’s words ring true. The case of Daniel Ellsberg prompted actions by Richard Nixon which triggered events eerily like the actions of Donald Trump and the events they have triggered today. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Trump: Indicted. Again.

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Donald J. Trump, twice impeached while President of the United States, has now been indicted twice since leaving the White House. I never imagined I’d be writing a lead line like that.

Trump has been charged by a federal grand jury sitting in Miami with putting the United States at risk by mishandling nuclear and military secrets after he left office. The indictment contains thirty-eight counts, alleging Trump:

  • Retained top-secret documents detailing U.S. nuclear secrets, military vulnerabilities, and plans for retaliating in the event of an attack after he left the White House.
  • Left such documents in boxes inside his Mar-a-Lago club’s ballroom, even as large gatherings were held within it.
  • Was caught on tape showing secret U.S. battle plans to private citizens, admitting as he did so that the plans had not been declassified.
  • Moved boxes of secret documents out of a storage room so his lawyers would not find them when they searched for papers that needed to be returned to the National Archives in compliance with a subpoena.
  • Asked an attorney to hide or destroy any “really bad” documents that were in his possession instead of returning them to the government in compliance with the subpoena.

Conviction on any one of these courts could result in a substantial fine and a jail sentence. Trump has now been arrested and arraigned on these criminal charges.

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