One of the lawsuits,
Department of Education v. Brown, was filed by borrowers who hold student loans. Myra Brown sued because her student loans are through private entities rather than the government, and she would get no relief under the current plan. Alexander Taylor, the other plaintiff, is mad because he would only get $10,000 forgiven rather than $20,000, as he didn’t have a Pell Grant.
These are not random scrappy ex-students. Instead, they’re carefully-curated conservative plaintiffs
represented by a famous high-profile conservative law firm, Consovoy McCarthy, that has worked with students suing to overturn affirmative action and
also with Trump in some election law cases. They made sure to initially sue in the Northern District of Texas, where Trump
appointed six of the 12 judges and George W. Bush appointed four. They were pretty much guaranteed to draw a conservative judge and get a win.
There’s a technical reason that neither of these people should be able to pursue this lawsuit. Plaintiffs need to have standing to bring a case. They must show that they were personally injured, that the defendant caused the injury, and that the defendant is the entity that can fix the injury. But here, the plaintiffs’ proposed fix is that Brown continues to receive no relief, that Taylor gets the $10,000 in relief he is currently eligible for taken away from him, and that 26 million other people get no relief at all.
The solicitor general for the United States, Elizabeth Prelogar, arguing on behalf of the government, pointed out that the injuries Brown and Taylor complain of are “
a complete mismatch” for the relief they seek. That’s because Brown and Taylor are pretending to say they want
more student loan forgiveness than the program provides, but what they’re actually asking the Supreme Court to do is to throw out the plan altogether. As Prelogar put it in oral arguments on Tuesday, “Parties cannot go to Court to make themselves and everyone else worse off.”
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