The majority then announced, with an opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts, that it was overthrowing the student loan forgiveness program, granting a request from six Republican state attorneys general on behalf of a loan servicer, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, that did not want to be used as a plaintiff. Without MOHELA, the states did not have standing to bring the suit—they are not directly harmed.
Roberts and the majority weren’t going to be bothered by the fact that their plaintiff was an unwilling participant in this highly partisan scheme. “By law and function, MOHELA is an instrumentality of Missouri … The [debt forgiveness] plan will cut MOHELA’s revenues, impairing its efforts to aid Missouri college students,” Roberts wrote. “This acknowledged harm to MOHELA in the performance of its public function is necessarily a direct injury to Missouri itself.”
Never mind that in oral arguments the state admitted that MOHELA wasn’t aiding Missouri college students because it hadn’t paid into that fund in 15 years, and “said in its own financial documents that it doesn’t plan to make any payments in the future.”
One of the challenges in overcoming the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is needing a sufficient leftist majority in both branches of Congress to pass legislation, and this majority needs to be large enough to overwhelm the more restrained members of that majority. If this ever actually happens, the revamp of the SCOTUS is an inevitability.
The grim reality is insofar as legislation goes, any law passed or executive action taken can be challenged legally and the SCOTUS seems very willing to grant cert in arbitrary and capricious manners to overturn the legislation (or past judicial decision). The only saving grace of this series of decisions lately is revoking the independent state legislature theory, but that doesn’t really stop state governments from committing electoral fraud :/
Rationality isn’t returning to the SCOTUS for a long time sadly.