Justice Roberts Cites French Revolution in Guillotining Biden’s Student Loan Plan

President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan was such an overreach you might as well have said French revolutionaries ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in striking it down Friday. 

Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said his department had the legal authority to cancel up to $20,000 from federal student loan balances because of the HEROES Act, a 2003 law that allows the secretary to “waive or modify” provisions of federal financial aid programs during emergencies like the pandemic. 

But Roberts and five other conservative-leaning justices ruled to nullify the plan, saying the Biden administration lacked the authority to cancel debt on such a broad scale and its interpretation of the word “modify” was far too broad.

"The Secretary’s plan has ‘modified' the cited provision only in the same sense that 'the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility'— it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. The secretary is authorized to make incremental and limited changes, not fundamental ones, he said.

"Congress opted to make debt forgiveness available only in a few particular exigent circumstances; the power to modify does not permit the Secretary to 'convert that approach into its opposite' by creating a new program affecting 43 million Americans and $430 billion in federal debt,” Roberts wrote.

Robert’s reference was particularly interesting given the fact that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also referenced the French Revolution in her scathing dissent of the court's decision to bar the use of affirmative action in higher education released Thursday.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote, in reference to the phrase attributed to Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France who was executed by guillotine. (Although attributed to Antionette and used as a way to demonstrate the ruling class’ obviousness to the lives of the poor, there is no evidence the fallen queen actually said the phrase, according to Britannica.)