Page:Biden v. Nebraska.pdf/70

Rh Secretary—this program is just too large.

The tell comes in the last part of the majority’s opinion. When a court is confident in its interpretation of a statute’s text, it spells out its reading and hits the send button. Not this Court, not today. This Court needs a whole other chapter to explain why it is striking down the Secretary’s plan. And that chapter is not about the statute Congress passed and the President signed, in their representation of many millions of citizens. It instead expresses the Court’s own “concerns over the exercise of administrative power.” Congress may have wanted the Secretary to have wide discretion during emergencies to offer relief to student-loan borrowers. Congress in fact drafted a statute saying as much. And the Secretary acted under that statute in a way that subjects the President he serves to political accountability—the judgment of voters. But none of that is enough. This Court objects to Congress’s permitting the Secretary (and other agency officials) to answer so-called major questions. Or at least it objects when the answers given are not to the Court’s satisfaction. So the Court puts its own heavyweight thumb on the scales. It insists that “[h]owever broad” Congress’s delegation to the Secretary, it (the Court) will not allow him to use that general authorization to resolve important issues. The question, the majority helpfully tells us, is “who has the authority” to make such significant calls. Ibid. The answer, as is now becoming commonplace, is this Court. See, e.g., West Virginia, 597 U. S. ___; Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Servs., 594 U. S. ___ (2021); see also Sackett v. EPA, 598 U. S. ___ (2023) (using a similar judicially manufactured tool to negate statutory text enabling regulation).

The majority’s stance, as I explained last Term, prevents Congress from doing its policy-making job in the way it