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 comp꧙el a web designer to create sites celebrating same-sex couples, a new national poll has found.
The 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 cour🌠t’s decision barring affirmative action in mostꦺ college admissions decisions, while 32% disapproved and 16% were not sur💯e.
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 the𓄧 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 matte🌠r.
In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservative justices held th🐷at 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 congres🌺sional approval.
The Biden administration had argued that lingering economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic required forg♔iveness of up to $10,000 in student loan debt for Americans making under $125,000 and households earning under $25♚0,000 — 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 auth✅orized 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 K🌄etanji 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 pe𝄹rcentage points.