I've written a number of comments here about how I didn't like the policy at issue here, but I think this is also right.

The student loan forgiveness plan was inflationary, poorly targeted and probably unnecessary, but obviously legal. I'm honestly gobsmacked at the lengths this court went to invent standing and rationale to overturn it. Who needs to win elections when you have a permanent higher body with veto over the President and the congress. Between the shadow docket and this nonsense, they can literally shape policy to be whatever they want.

I don't think obviously legal. I think you're right about the standing issue, but ignoring that, if it had reached the merits without any problem with standing, I think it is not obvious that the policy fits within the bounds of the HEROES Act. I really dislike the major questions doctrine - because I think it should be up to Congress to write laws without some other body second-guessing them about which parts of those laws are or aren't "major" - but I'm also not a strict textualist and often don't find these pure text-based arguments very compelling.

Separation of Powers is a pretty well-established principle of Con Law. The executive branch's responsibility is to execute the policies codified by the legislature, not to set policy via Presidential dictate.

When the legislature writes laws that give the President the power to modify or waive student loan debt in the case of a national emergency, and then we have a declared national emergency - the court has absolutely no grounds to say, "That's not what congress meant when they wrote the plain text of the law". It's absurd on its face - even more so for a body that pretends to be "textualist" when it suits their political goals.

The law says "[the Secretary] may waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV of the [Education Act] as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency."

It doesn't say that the Secretary can cancel the debt entirely. I think it's somewhat of a stretch to say that waiving or modifying a regulatory provision related to the debt is the same thing as canceling it. Most people would interpret that as meaning something like you can pause repayment, adjust interest rates, etc.

It doesn't say waiving or modifying "a" regulatory provision, it says waiving or modifying "any" regulatory provision related to the debt. That certainly includes canceling it. "Any" and "waive" aren't up to reasonable interpretation here, which is probably why Roberts dodged them in favor of drilling down exclusively on the word "modify" and taking his textualist hat off so he could ignore the law as written and approved by Congress can be ignored because it had never been used in identical fashion before by a president.

Two small silver linings though. Roberts and his majority pulling all of these crazy stunts makes the SC much more interesting and has generated a ton of public interest. Public awareness and participation is gonna be an important step in reforming the court. Second, now that the majority no longer bothers with creating a legal pretext for its edicts (they aren't decisions without actual standing), they have created space within the legal world for serious conversation and effort towards reforming the SC to return it to its original intent as a judicial rather than legislative body. Reading some of the dissenting opionions it should strike anyone that the veneer of legal plausible deniability behind the conservative court's actions has been pierced to the point where you have dissenting justices quite explicitly calling out the unconstitutionality of the court's actions in writing.

"In adjudicating Missouri’s claim, the majority reaches out to decide a matter it has no business deciding. It blows through a constitutional guardrail intended to keep courts acting like courts," she wrote, adding that by deciding the case, the high court "exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution."

I think it's a reasonable theory (regardless of how they apply it inconsistently). The President doesn't have universal power to do whatever, Congress should authorize specific actions that the President can do, and if those go beyond a reasonable amount of flexibility they would need to authorize that separately.

Say you hire someone to paint your house and then go on vacation and when you come back they replaced your roof as well and gave you a $30,000 bill. You would be legitimately angry that they didn't authorize this extra work with you first even if they argue it was related to painting because the roof interfered with the paint.