Justice Jackson responded with apparent incredulity. “But isn’t that your burden?” she asked. “You are bringing this lawsuit and you have to establish standing. And so to the extent we’re trying to assess whether or not MOHELA is actually going to be injured, I don’t think you can answer ‘but the government hasn’t said something.’”

Even now, the loan agency would not answer our questions or discuss our research, despite written requests and phone call inquiries. The Missouri attorney general’s office told The Times, “To establish standing, MOHELA had to prove only that they would have less money.” But whether MOHELA has standing is irrelevant; the loan agency is not a party to the suit.

Compare that with the lengths that normal people must go to in order to prove they are eligible for debt relief. They have to submit mountains of documentation. Their claims are often denied for the most trivial of technicalities — a form filled out with green ink instead of black or blue, an electronic signature instead of an inked one.

Applicants for the older Public Service Loan Forgiveness program have to get paperwork signed from employers they had a decade ago. If a loan servicer transfers the account, the borrower may lose her payment history, and therefore her eligibility for relief. People who attended predatory for-profit colleges have had to submit extensive applications for relief, documenting their schools’ false allegations and misrepresentations. Even the Biden plan required an application.

That’s the “hierarchy of credibility.” Missouri says that the loan forgiveness policy could hamper MOHELA’s ability to repay its debts to the state. Missouri then filed a lawsuit — not against the agency, but on its behalf, to try to shore up its future revenues. How would the state act if an individual debtor said she couldn’t make her payments?

Should the justices affirm this claim, they would effectively be confirming a fake plaintiff, false facts and an unjust claim. Falsehoods about falsehoods would be a hard way to lose the debt relief the president promised to 43 million Americans and their families. And a Supreme Court that doesn’t scrutinize basic facts would be a further disgrace for a body already plagued by scandal.

Eleni Schirmer, a writer and postdoctoral fellow at the Concordia University Social Justice Center in Montreal, is an organizer for the Debt Collective. Louise Seamster is an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of Iowa, and a nonresident fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

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