An upcoming Supreme Court fight over the Biden administration's student debt relief plan could see the 6-3 conservative majority employ a similar doctrine that quashed the Obama administration's landmark power plant emissions rule.
President Joe Biden's plan intends to forgive as much as $20,000 in student debt for up to 16 million borrowers. However, some legal experts have suggested the court's conservative supermajority could scrutinize the program under the so-called major questions doctrine.
The justices relied on the doctrine in 2021 to bar the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from extending its pandemic-era eviction moratorium and to block the Biden administration's vaccine-or-testing mandate for big businesses. Most recently, a 6-3 decision last summer blocked the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, quashing Biden's attempt to maintain the Obama-era rule.
