Americans narrowly back SCOTUS student loan, First Amendment rulings: poll
Slightly more Americans approve than disapprove of the Supreme Court’s rulings that President Biden could not unilaterally cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student debt and that Colorado’s government could not compel a web designer to create sites celebrating same-sex couples, a new national poll has found.
The ABC News/Ipsos survey found 45% of Americans approve of the high court striking down Biden’s attempt to forgive an estimated $430 billion in federally held debt taken out by up to 43 million student borrowers. Another 40% said they disapproved of the ruling and 14% said they didn’t know.
The country was more evenly split on the court’s ruling protecting web designer Lorie Smith’s First Amendment rights, with 43% approving of the decision, 42% saying they disapproved of it, and 14% saying they didn’t know.
Responses to the poll split along party lines, with 71% of Republicans and just 17% of Democrats approving of the student loan decision. In the First Amendment case, 68% of Republicans and 15% of Democrats backed the high court’s ruling.
An outright majority of Americans (52%) approved of the court’s decision barring affirmative action in most college admissions decisions, while 32% disapproved and 16% were not sure.
The affirmative action ruling was backed by 60% of white Americans and 58% of Asian Americans. More than half of black Americans (52%) disagreed with the ruling while Hispanic and Latino respondents were split (40% approving, 40% disapproving).
Most Americans (53%) also believe the Supreme Court justices hand down decisions based on partisan political considerations rather than on the basis of law (33%). The remaining 14% had no opinion on the matter.
In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservative justices held that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission could not force Smith, an evangelical Christian, to promote same-sex marriage through her web design company 303 Creative LLC.
Smith does not oppose working on projects unrelated to marriage for LGBTQ clients and said she has done so in the past.
The same six justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — also held that the president did not have authority to forgive student loans without congressional approval.
The Biden administration had argued that lingering economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic required forgiveness of up to $10,000 in student loan debt for Americans making under $125,000 and households earning under $250,000 — and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
The president had wanted to make use of a 2003 law meant to aid veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which authorized student loan forgiveness during a national emergency. The Education Department argued the pandemic constituted such an emergency, even though a pair of declarations to that effect expired May 11.
The court’s liberal bloc — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented in both cases.
The ABC News/Ipsos poll surveyed 937 US adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
