Former President Trump praised his appointments to the Supreme Court on Saturday, after the court struck down what he called President Biden’s “unfair” student debt relief plan.
“Yesterday, the Supreme Court also ruled that President Biden is not allowed to wipe out hundreds and hundreds of billions, probably trillions, of dollars in student loan debt, which would have been very unfair to the millions and millions of people who have paid their debt through hard work and diligence,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Pickens, South Carolina.
The former president’s three conservative appointees to the bench — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — all joined the majority opinion released on Friday, finding that Congress had not authorized the executive branch to forgive an estimated $430 billion in student loan debt.
Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan sought to provide up to $20,000 in debt relief for Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for other borrowers, if they made under $125,000.
Trump also celebrated the Supreme Court’s controversial rulings on affirmative action and a Christian website designer’s refusal to create wedding websites for same-sex couples.
The court ruled on Thursday that Harvard University’s and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s use of race in their admissions programs violated the 14th Amendment, upending decades of affirmative action programs.
On Friday, the justices ruled that a Colorado anti-discrimination law could not require an evangelical Christian web designer to create same-sex wedding websites, which she said violated her religious beliefs.
The former president claimed on Saturday that the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision would “move our country forward with a merit-based system of education” and called the decision in the same-sex wedding website case a “tremendous win” for religious liberty.