June 29, 2023 Supreme Court affirmative action decision

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks during street renaming ceremony for her in Miami-Dade County on March 6, in Cutler Bay, Florida.

A footnote in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s affirmative action dissent notes that her commentary is aimed at the issues raised by the challenge to University of North Carolina’s admission program — and not to the Harvard affirmative action case that was also before the court.

Jackson had recused herself from the challenge to Harvard’s use of race in admissions. She is one of four justices who graduated from Harvard, having attended both its undergraduate and law schools. But for years, she has sat on the university’s board of overseers. She announced during her Senate confirmation proceedings last year that she would not participate in the case against Harvard.

It was unclear in the lead-up to Thursday’s ruling whether the Supreme Court would issue separate opinions in the North Carolina and Harvard case. There was much overlap in the two lawsuits, but also some distinctions.

The Supreme Court ultimately combined its rulings into one majority opinion. Jackson’s dissent, however focused on the specifics of UNC’s admissions program.

In her dissent, she accused the conservative majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the court’s affirmative action ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

Class of 2023 cadets arrive for their graduation at the US Military Academy West Point, on May 27 in West Point, New York. 

The Supreme Court said US military service academies can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, despite a ruling effectively ending affirmative action in admissions to colleges and universities.  

In a footnote in the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said the cases before the court did “not address the issue” and left open the possibility that there are “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” in a future case. 

During oral arguments, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stressed the unique interests of the military and argued that race-based admissions programs further the nation’s compelling interest of diversity.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out the caveat in her dissent. 

Analysis: Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said the majority’s refusal to address military academies is a “strange punt in an opinion that otherwise goes a long way toward closing the door on all considerations of race in higher education.”

“As Justice Jackson’s dissent makes clear, this creates an awkward — and undefended — distinction between why it might be permissible for the federal government to consider race in military admissions, but not for state governments to do so in their civilian universities,” he added.

The Supreme Court is seen on Thursday, June 29, in Washington, DC.

CNN’s Joan Biskupic had a firsthand view of the reading of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action Thursday.

Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t waste any time in announcing the decision to gut affirmation action in college admissions, Biskupic said.

“You could have heard a pin drop, and he announces right off of the bat that they are rolling back all affirmative action. And I have to say, there was a little bit of defiance in his voice, even though … this is something that John Roberts has been working on for himself many, many years, back to his time as a young Ronald Reagan administration lawyer. He does not believe in any kind of race conscious remedies,” she said.

He also “kind of warned that he did not want universities and colleges to set up programs that might work in the shadows that might somehow take into consideration applicants’ racial backgrounds. It was one of his most robust, strongest statements ever,” Biskupic reported.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice on the court, “talked about the profound mistake that the majority was making here. She said it would close the doors of opportunity to people across the nation — for schools, for business, for the military; it would have such reverberations,” according to Biskupic.

“At the very end, she said, ‘We shall overcome.’ And it was a mournful robust dissent,” Biskupic said. “… The weight of history was so evident in the room.”

Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson sat “stone-faced,” according to Biskupic.

“Even though they were all trying to hold it in check, you could tell by the tension nonetheless on Justice Jackson’s face as she looked out,” she said.

The justices spoke for such a long time that they had to take breaks to drink water, Biskupic said.

Dr Wayne A.I. Frederick, President of Howard University, speaks during a roundtable discussion in Washington, DC, on August 8, 2022. 

Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick called the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action an “unfortunate decision.”

“Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are carrying an outsized burden to diversify so many industries in America. We represent only 3% of the higher [education] institutions, but we are responsible for 25% of the bachelor’s degrees,” he said on CNN Thursday. “By not allowing race to be considered in admissions elsewhere, you can put an even more outsized burden on historically Black colleges and universities who don’t have the capacity to carry that type of a burden.”

The ruling will make admissions decisions very complicated for HBCUs, he argued.

“So it is going to be a road that is going to require a lot more resources. I think that for institutions that don’t have as many resources could be blindsided by lawsuits about this,” Frederick said.

Then-Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, March 22, 2022 in Washington, DC. 

In her own dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the conservative majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the court’s affirmative action ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

Justice Jackson wrote that the majority had “detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences.”

“No one benefits from ignorance,” she added.

A footnote in her dissent went after the majority concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas, the only other Black justice on the court. 

“The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room — the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential,” the footnote said. 

In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.” 

Read her opinion here.

Harvard Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 2019.

While the Supreme Court ruled colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, the majority opinion suggested that applicants will still be able to discuss race through a personal lens in their admission essays.

“Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university,” the majority states.

The applicant’s writing could include discussion of how race affected their life, “be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote at the very end of the opinion.

Liberal justices unconvinced: The three liberal justices stressed in their dissent that even if the court did not formally end race-based affirmative action in higher education, its analysis will make it practically impossible for colleges and universities to take race into account.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Roberts’ reasoning fell far short of what was necessary to achieve diversity on campus.

“Because the Court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives, it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality. No one is fooled,” she wrote.

Students walk through the quad outside the student union at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in October 2022.

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, a landmark decision that upends long-standing precedent that has benefitted Black and Latino students in higher education.

In her fiery dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the decision will result in a less equal education system in the US.

“The result of today’s decision is that a person’s skin color may play a role in assessing individualized suspicion, but it cannot play a role in assessing that person’s individualized contributions to a diverse learning environment. That indefensible reading of the Constitution is not grounded in law and subverts the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection,” Sotomayor wrote, in part.

The decision “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter,” the justice wrote.

While the majority contended that an applicant could mention race in a college essays, Sotomayor said that would fall well short of achieving the goal of diversity.  

In one section of her dissent, she said that the “supposed recognition that universities can, in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.” 

Sotomayor said the majority employed an “unjustified exercise of power” that will only serve “to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.” 

“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said while reading a synopsis from the bench on Thursday.  

In ending her dissent, Sotomayor quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

She pointedly did not use the customary language of “I respectfully dissent.” 

Read her opinion here.

In this October 2022 photo, former first lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama arrive to cast their vote at an early voting venue in Chicago.

Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama expressed disappointment at the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action from college admissions.

In a lengthier statement, the former first lady took a more personal tone.

“Back in college, I was one of the few Black students on my campus, and I was proud of getting into such a respected school. I knew I’d worked hard for it. But still, I sometimes wondered if people thought I got there because of affirmative action. It was a shadow that students like me couldn’t shake, whether those doubts came from the outside or inside our own minds,” she said.

Michelle Obama said that those students who get accepted into universities due to legacy, athletics and resources are not questioned in the same way.

“So often, we just accept that money, power, and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level,” she said.

“So today, my heart breaks for any young person out there who’s wondering what their future holds — and what kinds of chances will be open to them. And while I know the strength and grit that lies inside kids who have always had to sweat a little more to climb the same ladders, I hope and I pray that the rest of us are willing to sweat a little, too. Today is a reminder that we’ve got to do the work not just to enact policies that reflect our values of equity and fairness, but to truly make those values real in all of our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods,” she concluded.

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas during the formal group photograph at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on Friday, Oct. 7, 2022. 

In a lengthy concurrence, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, one of two Black justices on the Supreme Court, spoke in unusually personal terms as he criticized the use of affirmative action policies by colleges and universities.

Thomas described the policies as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.” 

Liberal justices including Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, have slammed the decision in dissent, saying it is willfully ignorant about inequality in the US.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion on affirmative action for the conservative majority, saying the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race. He said the programs involve racial stereotyping, and had no specific end point.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a fiery dissent, saying the opinion “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

Here’s how the nine justices ruled in the case:

The view from the steps of the Stephen Robert '62 Campus Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is pictured on April 25, 2019. 

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the Harvard and University of North Carolina programs violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race. He said the programs involve racial stereotyping and had no specific end point. 

In this October 2022 photo, proponents for affirmative action in higher education rally in front of the US Supreme Court before oral arguments in Washington, DC. 

CNN Chief Legal Analyst Laura Coates said the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action in college admissions will have sweeping changes to education in the US.

“This opinion, make no mistake about it, it is going to change the landscape of education, and this is what the majority has asked for,” she said. 

Coates said she sees more confusion in the admissions process.

“I’m still scratching my head, as many admissions officers will be — so ‘I can take into consideration race as part of the student’s experience, but their actual racial group or category cannot be contemplated or taken into account?’” she said.

“While the actual language of the Supreme Court will come across as very intellectualized and esoteric as if in a classroom, in reality, how will this work? How will you be able to have certain color blindedness, but then at the same time allowed to take into account one’s experiences when race has been a part of that?” Coates said.

Coates commented on the scathing dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, which said the opinion “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” 

CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck noted that even if the court did not formally end race-based affirmative action in higher education, its analysis in the ruling will make it practically impossible for colleges and universities to take race into account — as the three liberal justices stressed in dissent.

Speaker of the House Rep. Kevin McCarthy speaks to members of the press outside his office at the Capitol on June 7, in Washington, DC. 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hailed the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, saying that the justices “just ruled that no American should be denied educational opportunities because of race.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling “a giant roadblock in our country’s march toward racial justice.”

“These negative consequences could continue for generations, as the historic harms of exclusion and discrimination in education and society are exacerbated,” he added.

President Joe Biden speaks during an event in the East Room of the White House on June 26 in Washington, DC. 

The Biden administration – from the White House to the Department of Education – is reviewing the affirmative action decision from the Supreme Court, an administration official said.

President Joe Biden last spoke about the pending case in November, when he said he urged his Justice Department to “defend the present policy before the Supreme Court” and voiced muted optimism that the Supreme Court would rule in a different way than today’s decision. 

About the ruling: The high court said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as an express factor in admissions, a landmark decision that overturns long-standing precedent that has benefitted Black and Latino students in higher education.

The Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 15, 2022.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, here’s some of the latest polling on affirmative action and the consideration of race in college admissions.

Most of the surveys find public support for banning the consideration of race in college admissions, but the results suggest that Americans’ opinions around this issue can be highly sensitive to the way the question is framed.

In a Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month, half (50%) of US adults say they disapprove of selective colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions in order to increase the racial and ethnic diversity at the school. One-third (33%) approve, with the remaining 16% unsure. Support for colleges giving consideration to race and ethnicity is higher among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (54% approve, 29% disapprove) and Black Americans (47% approve, 29% disapprove) than it is among White Americans (29% approve, 57% disapprove) or Republicans and Republican leaners (14% approve, 74% disapprove).

Roughly half (49%) of all US adults in the Pew poll say that the consideration of race and ethnicity makes the overall admissions process of these colleges less fair, with just 20% saying it makes the process more fair. But 36% say that considering race and ethnicity in admissions is good for ensuring equal opportunity for Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, higher than the 31% who say it’s bad for that purpose.

A CBS News/YouGov survey highlights the extent to which framing matters on this topic. In the poll, taken in mid-June, a 70% majority of Americans say the Supreme Court should rule that colleges are not allowed to consider race in admissions, with just 30% saying that the court should rule that colleges are allowed to continue considering race. At the same time, the poll finds a much closer split on affirmative action more generally: Just over half of the public (53%) says that affirmative action programs in hiring, promoting and college admissions should be continued, with 47% saying such programs should be abolished.

Few Americans have been playing close attention to SCOTUS’ consideration of affirmative action. A May poll from Marquette Law School found that a 55% majority of Americans said they hadn’t heard enough about the case to have an opinion, with 34% of the public favoring a SCOTUS decision that would ban the use of race as a factor in college admissions and only 12% opposed to such a ruling.

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as an express factor in admissions.

Read the opinion here:

In this October 2022 photo, activists rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, as the justices hear oral arguments in the affirmative action cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as an express factor in admissions, a landmark decision that overturns long-standing precedent that has benefitted Black and Latino students in higher education.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the conservative majority.

United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pose for their official portrait at the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building on October 7, 2022 in Washington, DC.

All eyes are on the Supreme Court for its final days of the term, as the justices will release cases on issues such as affirmative action, student loan payments and LGBTQ rights.

Of the cases remaining, several that most capture the public’s attention are likely to lead to fiery opinions and dissents read from the bench.

Here are some of the remaining cases to be decided:

Affirmative action in college admissions: The court is considering whether colleges and universities can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, a decision that could overturn long-standing precedent that has benefited Black and Latino students. At issue are programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that the schools say help them to achieve diversity on campus.

During oral arguments, the right side of the bench appeared ready to rule against the schools. Such an opinion would deliver a long-sought victory for opponents of affirmative action in higher education who have argued for decades that taking race into consideration – even in a limited manner – thwarts the goal of achieving a color-blind society.

Biden’s student loan program: The Supreme Court is also considering two challenges to President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, an initiative aimed at providing targeted debt relief to millions of student-loan borrowers that has so far been stalled by legal challenges.

Republican-led states and conservatives challenging the program say it amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student loan debt under the guise of the pandemic. At the heart of the case is the Department of Education’s authority to forgive the loans. Several of the conservative justices have signaled in recent years that agencies – with no direct accountability to the public – have become too powerful, upsetting the separation of powers.

Religious accommodation for postal worker: A former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, seeks to sue the US Postal Service because it failed to accommodate his request not to work on Sundays. A lower court had ruled against the worker, Gerald Groff, holding that his request would cause an “undue burden” on the USPS and lead to low morale at the workplace when other employees had to pick up his shifts. There appeared to be consensus, after almost two hours of oral arguments, that the appeals court had been too quick to rule against Groff.

Can businesses deny services to LGBTQ customers? At the center of another case is a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who seeks to expand her business and create custom websites to celebrate weddings – but does not want to work with gay couples out of religious objections to same-sex marriage. Smith has not yet moved forward with her new business venture because of Colorado’s public accommodations law. Under the law, a business may not refuse to serve individuals because of their sexual orientation. Smith, whose company is called 303 Creative LLC, said that she is willing to work with all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but she draws the line at creating websites that celebrate same-sex marriage because expressing such a message would be inconsistent with her beliefs.

The Supreme Court is set to rule on a headline-grabbing case concerning President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program that will affect the finances of millions of Americans.

Critics, including the Republican-led states that have sued, say the initiative amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student-loan debt under the guise of the pandemic.

But the legal impact could go well beyond the fate of the program.

The US Supreme Court is expected to hand down its opinion on the program after hearing oral arguments in the state-led case plus another brought by individual borrowers backed by a conservative group in February.

While most of the attention so far is focused on whether the Department of Education exceeded its authority in implementing the program, some court watchers are focused on an equally important procedural issue that is a major part of the case: whether the red states behind the challenge have the legal right, or “standing” to bring the dispute in the first place.

The court could rule to dismiss the challenges if they decide the plaintiffs do not have the “standing.”

The concept of standing is one that requires a party to establish an actual or imminent injury to get into court. Simply disagreeing with a policy is not enough. In recent years, states from one party have felt increasingly emboldened to come to court to sue an administration from a different party over a controversial policy. For the Biden administration, the issue is of critical importance now, especially as Republican-led states feel they have an advantage with the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.

Professor Samuel Bray of Notre Dame Law School said it’s a problem for both Democratic and Republican administrations and he worries about states using the judicial branch to bring federal policymaking to a standstill.

Judges are meant to decide concrete disputes between parties, the thinking goes, and they should not engage in political or policy debates better left to the other branches of government.

Keep reading here.

The conservative Supreme Court held oral arguments on October 31, 2022, to consider whether colleges and universities can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, a case that could diminish the number of Black and Hispanic students in higher education. The justices are expected to rule on the cases soon.

What’s at stake: Hanging in the balance was the future of admissions plans at hundreds of schools that have relied on court precedent for decades in order to achieve the educational benefits they say flow from student body diversity on campus.

Challengers in the case targeted Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their programs violate equal protection principles, dash the promise of a colorblind society, and discriminate against Asian Americans. They urged the court to overturn precedent and they say the schools should explore and further develop race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity.

At least nine states had already chosen to end consideration of race in university admissions at the time of the oral arguments, including Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Supreme Court precedent allows the consideration of race, but the court’s new composition of conservative justices did not hesitate last term to overturn decades old precedent in a case that curtailed a federal right to abortion.

A conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), was behind both challenges.

Edward Blum, the president of SFFA, hired a conservative boutique law firm, Consovoy McCarthy, to challenge the policies at the country’s oldest private university, Harvard and the country’s first public university, University of North Carolina. The firm is composed of several former clerks of Justice Clarence Thomas who has been a critic of affirmative action.

SSFA argued that the Harvard policy violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits schools receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race. He said the UNC policy is subject to Title VI, as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, which covers state universities.

Lower US courts have ruled in favor of the schools finding that the programs used race in a sufficiently limited way to fulfill a compelling interest in diversity.

The two disputes were initially consolidated, but after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson announced she would recuse herself from the Harvard case because she had served on the school’s board of overseers, they were decoupled, so the nation’s first Black female justice could weigh in on the issue in at least one case.

Read more about the cases here.

Concerns about ethics and transparency at the Supreme Court were reignited last week after Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged attending a luxury fishing trip on the private jet of a conservative hedge fund manager.

ProPublica detailed the 2008 trip with Paul Singer. Alito, the report said, did not report the trip or the flight he took on the private jet to Alaska on his annual financial disclosure, and also did not recuse himself from cases before the court involving Singer’s hedge fund. Alito denied any wrongdoing.

While much of the recent criticism about Supreme Court ethics and activities of justices has been leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas – for failing to disclose luxury travel and gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, a 2014 real estate deal he made with the billionaire real estate magnate, or Crow’s reported tuition payments for Thomas’ grandnephew – other justices have also come under scrutiny.

Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.

After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.

At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”

During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”

Justices are often known for usually maintaining a low profile, and the court’s public information office in recent years has been less forthcoming about their public appearances. But the court’s ruling last year in the abortion case propelled the nine jurists and their rulings to new heights and fueled new questions about the justices’ behavior both on and off the bench.

People rally in support of the Biden administration's student debt relief plan in front of the the Supreme Court on February 28, in Washington, DC.

Millions of borrowers may learn soon whether they could receive up to $20,000 in debt relief under President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

The fate of the unprecedented debt cancellation program lies with the Supreme Court, which is expected to soon decide to either uphold or strike down the proposal.

The student loan forgiveness program, which Biden announced last August, has been on hold due to legal challenges. No student loan debt has been canceled, despite the fact that the government approved 16 million applications eligible for relief last year.

Here are key things to know:

Who would be eligible for student loan forgiveness? The Biden administration has estimated that more than 40 million federal student loan borrowers would qualify for some level of debt cancellation, with roughly 20 million who would have their balance forgiven entirely, if the forgiveness program is allowed to move forward.

But not everyone with a federally held student loan would qualify. Individual borrowers who made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 a year could see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.

If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual could be eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness. But federal student loans that are guaranteed by the government but held by private lenders are not eligible unless the borrower applied to consolidate those loans into a Direct Loan by September 29, 2022.

How fast could borrowers see debt relief? If Biden’s program gets the green light, some borrowers won’t have to do anything to receive debt relief. An estimated 8 million people will receive debt relief automatically because the Department of Education already has their income on file, likely because of financial aid forms or a previously submitted income-driven repayment plan application.

And the Department of Education has kept the 26 million applications it received last fall on file. Those borrowers won’t have to apply again, and the government could begin issuing some debt cancellations fairly quickly.

For borrowers who have not applied but think they might be eligible, the application should be available again on the Federal Student Aid website if the Supreme Court allows the program to move forward.

Keep reading here.

Lorie Smith, a web designer from Colorado, speaks to reporters outside after the Supreme Court heard arguments in her First Amendment battle pitting claims of religious freedom against laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Washington, Dec. 5, 2022.  

Several conservative members of the Supreme Court seemed sympathetic in December of last year to arguments from a graphic designer who seeks to start a website business to celebrate weddings but does not want to work with same-sex couples.

The conservative justices viewed the case through the lens of free speech and suggested that an artist or someone creating a customized product could not be forced by the government to express a message that violates her religious beliefs.

Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that a businessperson’s objection would not be based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message the businessperson did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a lawyer for the designer that her “strongest ground” is that the designer’s work is “custom.”

Justice Clarence Thomas spoke about the history of public accommodation laws intersecting with the First Amendment. “This is not a restaurant, this is not a riverboat or a train,” he said.

On one side of the dispute is the designer, Lorie Smith, whose business is called 303 Creative. She said she has not yet moved forward with an expansion into wedding websites because she is worried about violating a Colorado public accommodations law. She said the law compels her to express messages that are inconsistent with her beliefs. The state and supporters of LGBTQ rights responded that Smith is simply seeking a license to discriminate in the marketplace. They said the law covers a businessperson’s conduct, not their speech.

The case comes as supporters of LGBTQ rights fear the 6-3 conservative majority – which last year decided to reverse a near 50-year-old abortion precedent – may be setting its sights on ultimately reversing a landmark 2015 opinion called Obergefell v. Hodges that cleared the way for same-sex marriage nationwide.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not violate the elections clause of the US Constitution when it invalidated the state’s 2022 congressional map, rejecting a broad version of a controversial legal Independent State Legislature theory pushed by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 6-3 opinion.

The case had captured the nation’s attention because Republican lawmakers in North Carolina were asking the justices to adopt a long-dormant legal theory and hold that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules established by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections.

“State courts retain the authority to apply state constitutional restraints when legislatures act under the power conferred upon them by the Elections Clause,” Roberts wrote.

The court allowed that federal courts can have some role supervising state courts in certain circumstances, with Roberts writing that “state courts do not have free rein.”

“Federal courts,” Roberts said, “must not abandon their duty to exercise judicial review.”

“When state legislatures act pursuant to their Elections Clause authority, they engage in lawmaking subject to the typical constraints on the exercise of such power,” he wrote. “In sum, our precedents have long rejected the view that legislative action under the Elections Clause is purely federal in character, governed only by restraints found in the Federal Constitution.”

Roberts was joined by fellow conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The decision will have ramifications for the future of elections nationwide.

Read more about the ruling here.

Activists and students protest in front of the Supreme Court during a rally for student debt cancellation in Washington, DC, on February 28, 2023.

Justices heard oral arguments in February in two challenges to President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan, with several conservative justices appearing skeptical of the government’s authority to discharge millions of dollars in federally held loans.

If the conservatives do ultimately rule in favor of the policy’s challengers, the hearing made clear they will have to grapple with the legal questions around why states and individual borrowers should be allowed to sue over the program – questions that emerged as a flash point during the arguments.

Millions of qualifying student loan borrowers could see up to $20,000 of their debt canceled depending on the ruling. The timing of the justices’ opinion is also important — it will determine when payments on federal student loans will resume after a pandemic-related pause was put in place nearly three years ago.

In Biden v. Nebraska, a group of Republican-led states argued the administration exceeded its authority by using the pandemic as a pretext to mask the true goal of fulfilling a campaign promise to erase student loan debt.

The second case is Department of Education v. Brown, which was initially brought by two individuals who did not qualify for the program, argued the government failed to follow proper rulemaking process when putting it in place.

Here are some takeaways from the oral arguments:

Conservatives saw this case as another chance to rein in aggressive actions by Biden: In the questions the conservative justices posed, they signaled that they see the GOP states’ case as presenting the court with another chance to draw the lines around when the executive branch can and cannot act without Congress.

Several of the exchanges concerned the application of the so-called “Major Questions Doctrine,” a legal theory embraced by the court’s Republican appointees that says Congress can be expected to speak with specificity when it gives an agency power to do something of great political or economic significance.

The states argued that under the doctrine, the Biden student debt program should be blocked.

Chief Justice John Roberts said to US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar that the case “presents extraordinarily serious important issues about the role of Congress.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Prelogar to compare the dispute to cases in the court’s history where the court ultimately pushed back against government claims that a national emergency justified the aggressive, unilateral action by the executive branch. And Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell, who represented the red states, a series a questions that seemed aimed at helping the court further flesh out the doctrine.

Lawyer for GOP state gets grilled on standing: Whether the GOP states are threatened by the type of harm that makes it appropriate for a court to intervene was a major theme. Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell received a series of questions – from justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum – about whether the states had overcome this procedural threshold, which is known as “standing.”

A particular flashpoint in the hearing was the states’ arguments that the loan forgiveness program’s potential harms to MOHELA – the Missouri-created entity that services loans in the state – gives Missouri standing. Several justices noted that MOHELA could have filed its own lawsuit challenging the program, but has not.

Read more takeaways here.