Answer: Nope. But the media has to make this interesting, even if the Biden administration knew what was coming all along.

For those who haven’t kept their scorecards updated, the Supreme Court will hear arguments today on Joe Biden’s grossly unconstitutional self-appropriation of $400 billion or so to pay off selected student loan debts. (The hearing should start just about the time this goes live, in fact.) The move creates a constitutional crisis, and courts around the country have almost without exception called a halt to it — when standing issues didn’t prevent it. This case scaled the appellate chain quickly enough to make the suspense more about the final vote rather than the outcome.

That doesn’t mean that some drama can’t be manufactured. The Associated Press does its best to generate as much drama as possible with this recollection from the memoir of Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas didn’t get out from under his own student-loan debt until he had served on the Supreme Court for three years, and the AP sees that as a slender reed. And this one’s so slender that it’s practically two-dimensional:

Thomas, the court’s longest-serving justice and staunchest conservative, has been skeptical of other Biden administration initiatives. And when the Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday involving President Joe Biden’s debt relief plan that would wipe away up to $20,000 in outstanding student loans, Thomas is not likely to be a vote in the administration’s favor.

But the justices’ own experiences can be relevant in how they approach a case, and alone among them, Thomas has written about the role student loans played in his financial struggles.

A fellow law school student even suggested Thomas declare bankruptcy after graduating “to get out from under the crushing weight of all my student loans,” the justice wrote in his best-selling 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He rejected the idea.

Ahem. Does the AP actually think that this would make Thomas more sympathetic to a government Deus ex machina regarding debt? Thomas had that option via bankruptcy court, and still he chose to pay it off himself. Nothing in Thomas’ character or his judicial rulings suggest that he judges cases through the prism of his own pecuniary or cultural self-interest, a point that will no doubt be made clear in the court’s upcoming decision on Affirmative Action. But even beyond that, Thomas’ character and life experience — even this debt issue — point to the opposite conclusion. Thomas is much more likely to argue that his example shows that people should take responsibility for their own choices.

And even if this policy of debt forgiveness is somehow desirable, Thomas will almost certainly argue that the policy and its funding has to originate in Congress, not at the nib of Joe Biden’s pen. Biden usurped the authority expressly and exclusively granted Congress in Article I of appropriations. To allow that to pass without consequence is to create an imperial executive that quickly would transform Congress into nothing more than an advisory panel.

Nor is that the only constitutional issue at play, although it’s likely the most dangerous. Ilya Shapiro reminded readers at City Journal that there are other constitutional grounds to revoke Biden’s pen-and-phone dictatorial effort, even with the so-called “emergency” that no one buys any longer:

The government’s lawyers now make the following assertions before the Supreme Court: the Covid-19 pandemic is a national emergency (or at least was at the time the plan was announced); every federal student loan borrower either lives in a Covid disaster area or has otherwise been financially affected by that emergency; as a result of that emergency, some borrowers will default on their loans once payments finally resume after a multiyear pause; and forgiving some (or all) of the borrowers’ principal balances will ensure their overall risk of default is no worse than it was before the pandemic.

That last assertion runs headlong into a key limiting word in the text of the HEROES Act: “necessary.” Most of the steps in this Rube Goldberg device of a financial plan are far from necessary to achieve their final aim, because a simpler and more direct method is available. If the government’s purpose were truly to reduce the harm of more defaults, it could put borrowers on income-based repayment plans and, even more simply, waive some of the legal consequences of missed payments. Forgiving $400 billion of debt so that fewer people will suffer penalties for missed payments is like cutting $400 billion in income taxes so fewer people will suffer IRS underpayment penalties.

The “major questions doctrine,” which the Court has increasingly applied, makes this an easy case. Since Biden’s executive action was not “necessary” to achieve the government’s aim, the statutory text lacks a clear statement granting the secretary such power. And because the loan-forgiveness plan is a matter of “vast economic and political significance”—to quote last June’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling, which rejected regulatory authority not found in statutory text—Congress has to have spoken clearly to grant such awesome power. Put another way, whether to grant nationwide debt relief is undoubtedly a “major question,” one that Congress debated as it considered bills that would explicitly make that choice. It’s a big policy decision that must be made by Congress—and Congress has declined to make it.

Shapiro also points out that the court has already shut down previous Biden-administration emergency diktats that had stronger connections to the claimed emergency. They struck down the CDC’s eviction moratoria twice, as well as OSHA’s “vaccine and test” mandate to private sector employers. In both cases, the court invoked the major-questions doctrine and pointed out that the statutory framework provided by Congress to these agencies didn’t extend the authorities they were attempting to exercise. The student-loan debt forgiveness plan has much weaker connections to an “emergency,” and its funding is completely ungrounded constitutionally. The only suspense here should be whether the ruling striking down this program gets all nine votes.

Still, let’s not kid ourselves. Biden and his team knew full well that this would not pass muster if it got into court. The point of this effort wasn’t to pay off student loan debt; it was to manipulate such debt holders into thinking that Biden was “fighting” for them. It was vote-buying on the cheap, and it arguably worked to some extent in the midterms. Biden and his team are playing out the string to argue that he’s still “fighting” for those with large amounts of student debt, when all he’s doing is posturing for a cause that was lost the moment it launched. Biden will turn a Supreme Court rebuke into another claim of victimhood and a promise to keep “fighting” for another term.