Excellent analysis, and I agree that the stopping such a wholesale appropriation of what should be congress' authority will outweigh any do-gooder urge among the conservative votes who might be tempted to waffle. Failure of the court to stop this would engender all sorts of follow-on complications and I think to whatever degree the conservative justices take originalism to heart in this case it will be enoughThe Supreme Court will hear the case:
Supreme Court Leaves Biden Student-Loan ‘Forgiveness’ on Hold, Agrees to Hear Case | National Review
Oral arguments in the case will begin in February.www.nationalreview.com
The Northern District of Texas's opinion for the stay (26 pages):
Loose predictions in absence of arguments:
That leaves ACB, Roberts, and Alito to really sway the court. From the most recent term, page 15 of the SCOTUSblog statpack, ACB and Alito are I think most likely to be aligned with Thomas & Kavanaugh, and I'd call Alito to be pretty secure on this. Roberts is kind of the wild card here because he doesn't like to make waves as chief justice, but I think he and Kavanaugh will make the case that while we have executive powers, they should not be expanded so drastically. The structural stability argument favors rejecting such absurd spending. The political stability argument is basically "the media will be mean to The Court."
- The three progressives will all vote in favor because it's "helping" people and we have a century of runaway Administrative state, so what's a little more.
- Thomas is a pretty secure vote. It's not in the constitution, it's not in the founding, it's not legal.
- Given their misgivings with the administrative state, I'd wager that Gorsuch & Kavanaugh will be with Thomas. Particularly that this is about spending and not rights/access, which I expect should mellow out Gorsuch's wildcard reputation on this.
So, it could be 5-4 in favor of the executive authority, but I think that's not so likely. Most likely is 5-4 against the administration or perhaps even 6-3 and we'll have another year of listening to accusations that the judiciary is being political when they rule to, you know, follow the constitution.