INTEREST DUE: President Biden immediately said he would resort to another plan after the Supreme Court yesterday threw out his executive order to relieve $400 billion in student debt. “Today’s decision has closed one path,” Biden said. “Now we’re going to pursue another.”

  Biden said he would lean on the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its provision that gives the secretary of education the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption.”

  The lawsuits to block Biden were brought by six Republican-led states; Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina.

  In the 6-3 decision voted by the Court’s conservative supermajority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that a financial decision of such magnitude as forgiving $400 billion in debt clearly requires the approval of Congress. Roberts declared that the administration’s argument that the Secretary of Education’s power to “waive or modify” loan terms was a vast overreach of executive powers. 

  Nearly 26 million student loan borrowers have applied to have some of their debt erased. No debts have been forgiven because of the legal challenges.

GOD RULES: Also yesterday, the 6-member conservative majority sided with a Colorado web designer who claimed a First Amendment right to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples despite the state law that bars such discrimination.

  The case was a question of business discrimination vs. First Amendment rights. The majority interpreted the request to create a gay wedding site as a demand to issue a message the designer does not believe, rather than something the customers were saying on their own behalf with the designer’s help. 

  Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said that the First Amendment protected the designer, Lorie Smith, from being compelled to express views she opposed. “A hundred years ago, Ms. Smith might have furnished her services using pen and paper,” he wrote. “Those services are no less protected speech today because they are conveyed with a ‘voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.’”

  The decision establishes that in the view of the Court, basic rights, including gay rights, are secondary to religious belief.  Justice Sonya Sotomayor delivered an impassioned dissent from the bench in which she “We are taking steps backward” on the matter of gay rights.

FRENCH TOAST: Violent unrest continued in France for the 4^th night with 1,300 people arrested protesting the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old driver. As many as 45,000 cops backed up by armored vehicles have been mobilized to deal with the crowds that have been looting and setting fires.

  The funeral was scheduled today for the teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent identified only as Nahel M., who was killed during a traffic stop. The police officer has been charged with voluntary homicide, a rare move that has angered police unions.

  The teenager’s death popped the bubble of anger over decades-long complaints about police violence and racial discrimination in France’s poorer urban areas.

POLITICAL CORRECTIONS: A women’s gender studies professor at the University of Cincinnati has been ordered to undergo free speech training after she failed a student for referring to non-trans female athletes as “biological women,” according to The Cincinnati Enquirer.

  Adjunct instructor Melanie Nipper, 28, was formally reprimanded for giving student Olivia Krolczyk zero out of 20 points on her Women’s Gender Studies in Pop Culture final project for using what the teacher called the “exclusionary” term.

  Krolczyk argued in her work that trans athletes competing in women’s sports are edging out “biological women.”

  Nipper wrote in her defense that her “restriction on harmful speech” was “necessary to ensure a safe learning environment in the course discussions.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Alan Arkin, an actor with a talent for both comedy and drama who won a Tony Award for his first lead role on Broadway and an Academy Award nomination for his first feature film, has died at age 89. 

  He was nominated for an Oscar as a Russian naval officer in, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” a comedy about a Russian submarine running aground on an island off Massachusetts. His memorable line as leader of the landing party was delivered in a fractured accent as he taught his non-English-speaking crew to shout “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”

  Arkin also played Yossarian, the bombardier in the movie version of Joseph Heller’s satirical World War II novel, Catch-22.

  Our favorite Arkin line was in the thriller “Wait Until Dark,” in which he plays one of three drug thugs terrorizing a blind woman in her home. As he pulls on rubber gloves he says, “Highly recommended. Disposable, you buy them in enormous rolls… from Hammacher Schlemmer.”

THE SPIN RACK: Fox News agreed to pay $12 million to Abby Grossberg, the former producer who accused the network of operating a hostile and discriminatory workplace and of coercing her into providing false testimony in a deposition. The claims, which Fox has previously said were not true, involved among other people, the fired host Tucker Carlson. — The ESPN sports network is laying off about 20 on air stars to save money. Early reports say the firings include Max Kellerman, Keyshawn Johnson, Suzy Kolber, and Jalen Rose. We don’t watch ESPN, so we don’t know any of them.  — Bobby Kennedy Jr., scion of the political family, reported an income of $7.8 million in the year before his entry into the race for president. That includes nearly $1.6 million the anti-vaxxer made in consulting work for a law firm that sues pharmaceutical companies.

BELOW THE FOLD: The Vienna-based Wiener Zeitgung, which is believed to be the world’s oldest continually published newspaper, ran its last print edition yesterday after 360 years. The paper owned by the Austrian government wasn’t making enough money. The editors hope to publish once a month online, but you can’t snap that open over your morning Tiroler Gröstl.

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