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Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in Friday’s ruling striking down President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, defended the Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s use of a controversial legal theory and, deploying analogies about nannies and grocery store owners, she set out how she believed. The doctrine should be used in the future.
The so-called major issues doctrine says that executive branch agencies only have the authority to take aggressive unilateral actions of significant political or economic importance if Congress explicitly grants them that power.
In the student loan case, the 6-3 conservative majority, including Barrett, concluded that the student loan law at issue did not give the education secretary the power to write off large chunks of loans.
Barrett laid out the utility of the doctrine explaining scenarios where, he writes, context is key to interpreting the limits of authority Congress has delegated to an agency.
The grocer’s hypothetical refers to a store owner who normally has 200 apples on hand and then instructs an employee to “go to the orchard” to buy more apples.
“While this grant of apple-buying authority sounds unqualified, a reasonable employee would know there are limits,” he wrote.
“For example, if the grocer usually has 200 apples on hand, the clerk has no real authority to buy 1,000; the grocer would have spoken more directly if he wanted to authorize such an extraordinary purchase,” Barrett. he wrote. “An employee who doesn’t take context into account and stretches words to the max won’t have a job for long.”
A second hypothetical focused on a babysitter who took the children to an amusement park over the weekend, after giving the parent’s credit card and saying, “Make sure the kids they have fun.”
“Encouraged, the competing babysitter takes the kids on a road trip to an amusement park, where they spend two days on roller coasters and one night in a hotel,” Barrett writes.
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But whether the nanny misinterpreted the authorization she had to use the parents’ credit card may depend on other obvious or even less obvious facts, Barrett said.
“Was the nanny’s trip consistent with the parents’ instructions? Perhaps in a literal sense, because the instruction was open. But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent’s instructions? Very doubtful.”
Barrett wrote that, under a set of contextual facts, the nanny’s move appeared to overreach an instruction that was intended for a trip to the “local ice cream parlor or the movies, not a multi-day trip out of town.” . Amusement park.”
But under another set of circumstances: “maybe dad left amusement park tickets on the counter” or maybe dad said there was $2,000 budgeted for weekend entertainment – the nanny move to go to the amusement park would seem like a “reasonable” understanding that parents had approved, Barrett said.
“If a parent were willing to give the green light to such a big trip, we would expect a lot more clarity than a blanket instruction to ‘make sure the kids have fun,'” he wrote.
“In my view, the leading questions doctrine grows out of these same common-sense principles of communication,” Barrett wrote. “Just as we expect a parent to give more than a general instruction if he intended to authorize a nanny-led getaway, we also” expect Congress to speak clearly if it wants to assign an agency to decisions of great “economic importance and politics”. ‘”
The Supreme Court’s use of the major issues doctrine to strike down Biden’s loan forgiveness program struck a nerve that went beyond education policy, with conservative and liberal justices arguing over how the controversial legal theory that has been used, with increasing frequency, to attack. Reduce the unilateral acts of the executive power.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by other liberals, said in a footnote that she could “virtually rest” her case that the loan forgiveness program was lawful with competition.” reflexive” by Barrett.
Kagan pointed to other tests Barrett proposed for interpretation under the doctrine, such as whether the challenged action was in the agency’s wheelhouse or whether the delegated power was hidden in some “ancillary provision.” ”
“The broad word ‘renounce or modify; The delegation IS the HEROES Act, not a hidden supplemental provision,” Kagan wrote, referring to the student loan program statute. “And as JUSTICE BARRETT agrees, “this is not a case where the agency is operating entirely outside its usual domain.” So I could pretty much rest my case on JUSTICE BARRETT’s reasoning.
