Two more excellent Supreme Court rulings

 This:

The Supreme Court on Friday invalidated President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, meaning the long-delayed proposal intended to implement a campaign trail promise will not go into effect.

The justices, divided 6-3 on ideological lines, ruled in one of two cases that the program was an unlawful exercise of presidential power because it had not been explicitly approved by Congress.

The court rejected the Biden administration's arguments that the plan was lawful under a 2003 law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act. The law says the government can provide relief to recipients of student loans when there is a “national emergency,” allowing it to act to ensure people are not in “a worse position financially” as a result of the emergency.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the HEROES Act language was not specific enough, writing that the court's precedent "requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."

The plan, which would have allowed eligible borrowers to cancel up to $20,000 in debt and would have cost more than $400 billion, has been blocked since the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary hold in October.

About 43 million Americans would have been eligible to participate.

The student loan proposal is important politically to Biden, as tackling student loan debt was a key pledge he made on the campaign trail in 2020 to energize younger voters.

And this:

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that an evangelical Christian web designer could not be forced to work on wedding sites celebrating same-sex couples because it would violate her First Amendment right against compelled speech.

The 6-3 decision settled the 2016 case brought by Lorie Smith, 39, who sued the Colorado Civil Rights Commission over the state’s anti-discrimination laws that barred her from advertising that she won’t create websites for couples of the same sex. 

But the high court found that to compel Smith to make sites “celebrating other marriages she does not” would be “an impermissible abridgment of the First Amendment’s right to speak freely,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

Under Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act, businesses are barred from denying the public goods and services based on race, gender, sexual orientation and religion — and they can’t post notices doing so either.

But Smith — a married mother of one who owns graphic design firm 303 Creative LLC — has claimed the Centennial State law clashes with her right to refuse business that conflicts with her religious beliefs.

 Some thoughts:

• The student loan forgiveness scheme was rank redistribution. The money owed doesn't just go away. The obligation to pay it back is merely shifted to taxpayers.
• As I noted last August, this was bound to become a court case. Biden never offered even a  flimsy attempt at justifying a purely executive-branch move. Congress was completely sidelined.
• As I also noted then, student loan forgiveness encourages a shrugging-off-responsibility mindset throughout our society. If a precedent is set, how long is it before progressive policy types start opining that car loans and home loans need forgiving? It erodes the principle at the heart of the free market: that an economic transaction occurs when two parties, a buyer and seller, agree on the value of the good or service to bee exchanged, and each understands the obligations he or she is undertaking.
• Administrative bloat is the main reason the cost of higher education has gone up so much.
• Let's nip in the bud any notion that taking a pass on providing wedding services for a same-sex couple is discrimination in the sense that denying lodging, a restaurant table, or the opportunity to look at houses to buy in particular neighborhoods was when racial bigotry met little challenge in this country. There is no explanation for such denials but bigotry. Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 and 20 are, for Christians, God-breathed pronouncements about wrong ways for human beings to use their sexuality. 
• All three of these decisions came down 6 -3, as was entirely predictable.
• No, this doesn't mean the Very Stable Genius was a great president. Any Republican president circa 2017 - 2020 would have made similarly great federal court appointments.

In many ways, these decisions and the one yesterday regarding affirmative action offer us an opportunity to revisit the whole concept of rights - what a right is, what, by definition, cannot be a right, how humankind came to get clear about these matters. I think this will be the subject of my next Precipice post, which I shall spend the afternoon composing.