Month: August 2024

The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined the Biden’s administration latest student loan debt relief plan. In a brief order, the court denied an emergency request filed by the administration seeking to lift a nationwide injunction imposed by an appeals court.

The justices turned down a request from the Justice Department to lift a sweeping appeals court order that blocked the program (known as the SAVE plan) which has been the subject of legal challenges from more than a dozen GOP-led states in recent months. The Court’s unsigned order said that it “expects that the Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch.” There were no noted dissents.

The Education Department paused loan payments for borrowers enrolled in the program earlier this month because of the ongoing legal proceedings.  The Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s earlier plan last year that would have benefited more than 40 million Americans and forgiven nearly half-a-trillion-dollars in loans.

The latest program is an income-driven repayment plan in which monthly payments of a loan are based on the borrower’s income. The SAVE plan lowers monthly undergraduate loan payments to 5% of a borrower’s’ discretionary income above 225% of the federal poverty line — up from 150% — and provides for shorter repayment periods and earlier loan forgiveness for borrowers with smaller starting balances. The administration said it had the authority to make these changes under the Higher Education Act and estimated that out of the 8 million borrowers who enrolled in the SAVE Plan, 4.5 million have monthly payments of $0.

The brief unsigned order saw the Court reject the states’ request to lift that appeals court’s stay, noting that “the states said they do not require relief from the Supreme Court as long as the 8th Circuit’s order is in place.” The 8th Circuit’s decision blocks implementation of the program for borrowers nationwide and is at odds with the order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in the dispute involving the three other states, which kept the SAVE plan intact during legal proceedings.

Editorial credit: Fedor Selivanov / Shutterstock.com

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court revived former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel Wednesday granted former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a new libel trial, faulting the trial judge for dismissing the case before the jury had reached a verdict. The jury was allowed to continue deliberating before ultimately finding the newspaper not liable in February 2022.

Senior United States Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr. wrote in the opinion: “Unfortunately, several major issues at trial — specifically, the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question, and jurors learning during deliberations of the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal ruling — impugn the reliability of that verdict. We conclude that the district court’s Rule 50 ruling improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case. No statement in this opinion should be understood as resolving issues of fact.”

Palin sued for defamation in 2017, claiming she was defamed in an editorial when her rhetoric was linked to the Tucson shooting attack that wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.  According to the appeals court opinion, the editorial in question said the Giffords shooter’s “rage was nurtured in a vile political climate” and that the “pro-gun right [was] criticized” at the time. The editorial also noted that before the shooting Palin’s political action committee had “circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”

The libel case against the Times was first reinstated on August 2019, but the district court dismissed her case again under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50. The New York Times said in a statement: “This decision is disappointing. We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial.”

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