The Supreme Court may be on summer break, but its schedule is still quite busy.
After a decision season that saw landmark case after landmark case that will define history, emergency appeals from the Biden administration and Republican state attorneys general have made the justices’ summer crowded.
For starters, a decision is expected any day now on the challenge by three Republican-led states to President Biden’s latest student loan plan. On Monday, the Biden administration called for restricting rulings that freeze sweeping Title IX changes in some states.
And on Tuesday, 25 Republican state attorneys general urged the high court to suspend the government’s rules on power plants.
The backlog of requests pushes the Supreme Court into major disputes, despite remaining out of court until the start of its next term in October.
Judges often act quickly on emergency appeals in a matter of days or weeks, including during the summer holidays. The truncated process typically does not include oral arguments and the justices sometimes do not even discuss the case in person.
Student debt
Two weeks ago, the legal battle over student debt returned to the Supreme Court, which previously struck down Biden’s plan that would have forgiven $430 billion in student loans for more than 40 million borrowers.
Republican state attorneys general in Alaska, South Carolina and Texas now want judges to partially block Biden’s latest plan, known as the Saving on Valuable Education (SAVE) program. The states claim it also exceeds the government’s authority, claims the Biden administration rejects.
“It ignored this Court’s clear instruction that only Congress can forgive loans en masse – something Congress clearly chose not to do,” state attorneys general wrote in court documents filed Friday.
The three states urged the justices to reinstate a preliminary injunction that would block a provision that lowered the maximum monthly payment limit for millions of borrowers based on their income.
The written brief is complete, which means the court can rule at any time.
No matter what, however, a separate federal appeals court temporarily suspended the entire SAVE plan last week until it can decide whether to grant a longer pause. That challenge is led by Missouri alongside six other Republican-led states.
Title IX
While the Justice Department fights to preserve its student debt plan, it has filed two emergency requests of its own with the Supreme Court on another controversial issue.
The requests urge the justices to restrict a pair of lower injunctions that block the Department of Education’s new Title IX rule from taking effect in certain states. Republicans challenged the sweeping changes, which would, for the first time, expand the law’s protections against sexual discrimination to cover sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Biden administration says the injunctions, which block all new regulation, go too far. Title IX also strengthens protections for pregnant and parenting students and changes the way schools handle complaints of sexual harassment and assault.
In court filings, the Justice Department argued that only the prohibition on gender identity discrimination at the center of the proceedings should remain frozen at this stage of the case. It is expected that the department will still defend this provision in the future.
Ten Republican-led states where the rule is blocked — Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia — must respond by Friday to the administration’s request to the Supreme Court.
Power plant rule
A challenge to the Biden administration’s updated climate standards for power plants is also making its way to the Supreme Court.
All 27 Republican state attorneys general in the country sued over the new standards, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released in April, nearly two years after the Supreme Court blocked the Obama-era version of the plan.
After losing in a lower court last week, 25 of the states filed an emergency motion Tuesday urging the Supreme Court to halt the plan, calling the new case “déjà vu all over again.”
“The effort is perhaps more subtle than the EPA’s last attempt; he did not give the Rule a special name or coin any new terms. But it is no less problematic to set impossible-to-meet standards for regulated facilities, eliminating states’ discretion to repair harm and, ultimately, pushing regulated sources into early retirement.” the states wroteled by West Virginia and Indiana.
The fossil fuel industry and the other two Republican-led states will still be able to file separate appeals.
Matters decided
The pending appeals follow what was already a busy emergency docket after the court released its final rulings on the deadline earlier this month.
The court acted this month on proposals from two death row inmates to halt their executions, in a rare move that grants one request and denies another, as is more common.
On Monday, Judge Neil Gorsuch denied a former Colorado county official’s emergency motion to block his impending criminal trial.
Tina Peters, the clerk, is accused of illegally allowing a copy of the hard drives of her county’s voting equipment to be made during a software update. Peters said she did this while investigating voter fraud in 2020.
Peters has pleaded not guilty to all 10 charges and maintains his charge is politically motivated. The trial is set to begin July 29 after Gorsuch declined his unlikely request to intervene on Monday.
Gorsuch, who by default handles emergency appeals arising out of Colorado, issued his order while he was scheduled to be in Portugal teaching law students.
And last week, the full court refused to postpone the weeklong prison sentences of three Texas protesters on charges following their protest against a Confederate monument outside a local courthouse in 2020. There were no public dissents.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
