SCOTUS rejects DOJ request to let any of the SAVE student loan plan to go into effect

Universal injunctions are fine when the Supreme Court likes them.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that justices’ past protest of universal injunctions is mere political rhetoric, allowing a lower court ruling to remain in place for now blocking one of the Biden administration’s latest student loan relief efforts nationwide.

The justices — with no noted dissents — rejected a Justice Department request to vacate a universal injunction blocking the Education Department from implementing most of the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, program — and potentially more — while litigation is ongoing.

Of four lower courts to consider the plan in two challenges brought by some Republican-led states, only the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit fully blocked the plan during appeals. That order had followed an order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which would have allowed the plan to go into effect during appeals.

But on Wednesday, under the Supreme Court’s order, the Eighth Circuit’s nationwide injunction against implementation of the SAVE plan is the only one that matters for now. The Eighth Circuit’s injunction, moreover, also potentially blocks relief beyond the SAVE plan itself — including forgiveness under the previously existing REPAYE plan that the SAVE plan modifies.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, in a stark brief, had asked the justices to vacate that injunction because it was “vastly overbroad” on multiple grounds — and because it conflicted with the Tenth Circuit’s ruling.

Additionally, and as detailed previously at Law Dork, regarding the legal merits of the underlying plan: This is a different program, taking different actions, and using a different law than the program blocked by the Supreme Court in 2023.

None of that — the breadth, the conflict, or the fact that it’s a new program — mattered to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The order denied the DOJ request with no explanation, merely noting, “The Court expects that the [Eighth Circuit] Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch.”

Because of the order in the case out of the Eighth Circuit, moreover, the Supreme Court highlighted its own hypocrisy in another way. The justices also denied a request from the states whose lawsuit is subject to the Tenth Circuit’s order because they “do not require emergency relief from this Court as long as the Eighth Circuit’s injunction … is in place.”

In other words, they didn’t need to win in their case because the Supreme Court allowed a nationwide injunction to remain in effect in another case.

In the interim, most of the SAVE Plan — and, potentially, the REPAYE plan’s preexisting provision of forgiveness — is blocked nationwide.

For borrowers, the Biden administration had previously announced that affected loans had been placed into forbearance. It appeared, per information provided about the Eighth Circuit injunction, that would continue after Wednesday’s order.

The lessons of the current court are not about law. They are political lessons.

Universal injunctions are bad when progressives win below — like in the challenge to Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors — or when conservative judges decide that a far-right lower-court win is inconvenient — like when Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk tried to ban mifepristone nationwide — but it is fine here.

In the Idaho case, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote extensively about how it was “a welcome development” that the court was taking on the issue of “universal” relief — when it came to stopping a state’s anti-transgender law. He continued, indignant at the breadth of the injunction:

The district court’s universal injunction defied these foundational principles. It did not just vindicate the plaintiffs’ access to the drug treatments they sought. It purported to bar the enforcement of “any provision” of the law against anyone. App. A to Application for Stay 54. The district court issued this sweeping relief even though, by its own admission, the plaintiffs had failed to “engage” with other provisions of Idaho’s law that don’t presently affect them …. In choosing such an extraordinary remedy, the district court clearly strayed from equity’s traditional bounds

Gorsuch also had questioned the breadth of lower court’s orders in oral arguments this past term, as covered by CBS News’s Melissa Quinn.

Here, however, is the Eighth Circuit’s injunction allowed to remain in effect by Wednesday’s Supreme Court order:

The Government is, for any borrower whose loans are governed in whole or in part by the terms of the Improving Income Driven Repayment for the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program and the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, 88 Fed. Reg. 43820, enjoined from any further forgiveness of principal or interest, from not charging borrowers accrued interest, and from further implementing SAVE’s payment-threshold provisions. This injunction will remain in effect until further order of this court or the Supreme Court of the United States. The administrative stay is hereby superseded.

Here is what Gorsuch had to say about that:

Nothing. He wrote nothing.

Justice Clarence Thomas also previously criticized nationwide injunctions — when they were being issued against the Trump administration.

He, also, wrote nothing on Wednesday.