“For the past four years, I have worked tirelessly to keep our schools free from education. It deeply saddens me to think that all of my hard work will go to waste.”
27 thoughts on ““Betsy DeVos Warns That Biden Will Pick Education Secretary with Background in Education””
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“It’s a big club”…
“Satire from The Borowitz Report”
I taught high school social studies for 3 years. But my sister has been an elementary school teacher for nearly 20 years and she DESPISES Betsy DeVos. I’m honestly not up enough on most of the policies DeVos put in place to have an opinion one way or the other. But there is one policy with which I am in total agreement. That was her retraction of a Title IX “guidance letter” sent to colleges and universities from the Obama Administration. That letter in effect threatened schools with the loss of federal funding if they afforded students accused of sexual harassment or even sexual assault with due process in campus disciplinary proceedings.
Personally, I think sexual assault charges belong in criminal court, not in a campus proceeding. But many assault allegations are handled those proceedings. The Obama Administration instructed schools that in such hearings an accused student should not be allowed to question witnesses or to cross examine their accuser. In addition, they were instructed that the burden of proof should be preponderance of the evidence instead of clear and convincing. Preponderance of the evidence simply means more likely than not, 51% of the evidence. Clear and convincing is a higher burden of proof that is still less than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of a criminal trial. The problem with a preponderance standard is that if the tryer of fact (judge) finds one side just a little more credible than the other (or if they are predisposed to believe female accusers) innocent students lives can be ruined. That is especially true if they are prevented from putting on a defense. If a student is guilty of sexual assault they deserve to have their lives ruined. But that should not happen based on accusations alone.
Yep, the important thing now is to find any mistakes or misteps ever made by Democrats so you can go on believing the Republican Party is still needed and don’t have to admit how impossible it is now to both be a decent person and be a Republican. God knows how many people are working like switch engines that way so they don’t have to admit how wrong they were, or for how long.
I am in a lousy mood. Someone BESIDES MMc let me know if I am way off base here. I am just not ready to hear someone badmouth Obama after what we have had to put with from Trump. But I know that it’s not like Obama was a saint or a superman.
MMc isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed…best to ignore him.
I wasn’t trying to bash the President Obama or his administration. But that guidance letter was something I very strenuously disagreed with and thus one thing I agreed with DeVos about. I happen to believe that accused students should be entitled to due process of law, even in campus hearings. Students at state universities have a Constitutional right to due process, though that hasn’t stopped some state universities from denying it to some students. Courts have overturned disciplinary determinations as a result.
Yes, many sexual assaults go unreported. But that doesn’t mean every report that is made is true. Indy says false accusations are extremely rare. I have no evidence as to how rare such accusations are, but there have been some very prominent examples of false ones. The problem is that if you believe false accusations are rare you are going to be predisposed to believe every accuser (and thus find their accusation more likely to be true) unless presented with evidence to the contrary. But if you don’t allow the accused to question his accuser it is very unlikely he will be able to find such evidence even if he is innocent. Yes, preponderance of the evidence is the standard in a civil trial. An accuser does have the right to file a civil suit. But in such a case, the defendant is entitled to discovery including a deposition of the plaintiff.
I happen to believe that because the accusation is so heinous, due process is more important not less. It used to be that it was Democrats that were more likely to support the civil rights of those accused of a crime. Is wanting every accused to be afforded due process really that controversial?
African Americans get thrown into federal prison for decades for crimes they don’t commit, and when they’re exonerated, not a peep. Women get assaulted and it goes unreported, not a peep. A well off white male on campus may get removed from school by this supposed hypothetical of a false allegation? Five alarm fire! We demand justice!
More worried about some hypothetical of the protected class being possibly harmed in some way versus the reality of actual victims, but really don’t actually give a shit in any significant way about true justice. More worried about some fairly tale of some rich white kid on campus getting expelled, NOT a criminal charge, rather than minorities being exonerated after decades, or other thousands of women being assaulted and ignored.
The standard is appropriate, because background can and should be introduced, because of the nature of the crime. If a girl ends up at a frat party for the first time in her life as a freshman that just got on campus, gets raped, and the individual responsible has a personal history of shady things or history of accusations run ins – that can, and SHOULD, come into determination considering the circumstances. The circumstances of backgrounds, the events that unfolded over the night, and the personalities involved where preponderance is an appropriate standard. You don’t continue to tell a sexual assault victim ‘too bad’ and have to go to class with her rapist, because she didn’t provide affirmative evidence in a situation where it’s impossible to prove.
It seems like you’re more than willing than to allow that to happen to women because your standard basically boils down to ‘well you should have recorded it or had people watch you when it happened.’ Which is bullshit. You don’t let sexual assault victims suffer in perpetuity allowing their assaulter on campus just because it’s not fair that their actions and history be accounted for appropriately.
Sorry if the rich asshole who’s been accused five times and has a history of being a dickhead gets expelled because the woman he assaulted didn’t take video to meet some imaginary standard, and her history and word actually meant something. Boo fucking hoo.
Maybe take some of your ‘concern’ and apply it to actual justice rather than ridiculous hypotheticals to build your world view around.
First of all, not every student that is accused of sexual assault is rich and/or white. Second, I never said that a history of bad behavior by the accused shouldn’t be considered. What I said was that the accused should have the right to question witnesses, including their accused. The penalty these students face goes beyond expulsion because the fact of that expulsion (and some times the reason for it) can follow that student for the rest of their life.
I am well aware that our criminal justice system results in injustices. I spent a year working with federal inmates, the majority of whom were African-American and Hispanic. Very few of the women there were rich. Some of these women had stories that would break your heart. The majority of the women I saw there had been convicted of drug crimes, often because some man in her life did her wrong. There was one African-American woman that came to see me. She told me “I am a 52-year-old woman, I was never in trouble with the law, and I don’t know why I’m here.” I read through her presentence investigative report so that I could explain it to her. She had pled guilty to maintaining a residence in furtherance of a drug conspiracy. Her son lived with her and while she knew he was a drug dealer, she had told him never to bring that stuff into her home. Reading between the lines it was fairly obvious a real scum bag of a prosecutor must have wanted the son to testify against higher ups and told him if he didn’t they would put his mom in prison. He wouldn’t and they did. They must have had evidence he kept drugs in her home and her lawyer had recommended a plea bargain. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help her other than try to explain all that. Her plea bargain had forfeited her right to appeal. That was the greatest injustice I encountered, at least so far as a person that shouldn’t be in prison.
There was another woman that told me she had been raped by a guard at a Federal Transfer Facility in Oklahoma City. I believed her and my professor was able to get the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to launch an investigation. Personally, I believe that guard should have spent the rest of his life in a prison where all the inmates knew he had been a prison guard and what he had been convicted of. But much as I feel he deserved that, he was still entitled to a trial and Due Process of Law. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened because I was never told the guard’s name and I graduated before anything came of the investigation.
When you encounter injustices in our criminal justice system or in our society as a whole, the proper thing to do is to try and correct it. Expanding the injustice to include more privileged white men is not the proper response. Everyone has the right to Due Process, no matter how heinous the crime is or how “privileged” the accused happens to be.
You seem to feel it’s OK if a rich dickhead gets expelled without a fair hearing. But what if the kid being accused is a black kid with a scholarship? You say false accusations are rare, but there have been plenty of examples of black men being falsely accused. Can you come up with a system that will protect the rights of minorities even as rich white kids are denied theirs?
You’re acting as if it’s an unfair system, when it’s simply appropriate for the type of offense it is. We use our civil system after the preponderance of evidence standard, and it’s appropriate for the same circumstance for whatever University policy is.
An inappropriate policy is to tell victims of sexual abuse that ‘sorry, you may have been raped, but according to evidentiary standard, too bad’ Even though it’s completely unreasonable to expect an overpowered woman on her own to be potentially assaulted and produce affirmative evidence to prove it.
Conservatives love to pump out non-existent hypothetical as to why things shouldn’t change, because of a lottery chance situation that someone may somehow get a false claim through, despite no evidence this occurs on any sense of scale, because the clear fact you make an accusation against someone else typically causes yourself harm alone.
You don’t ignore sexual assault victims because someone expects them to get it on tape or get a confession from the criminal on their own, because of some pie in the sky bullshit that false accusations will suddenly ruin people’s lives. If the standard works good enough to ruin lives in millions in civil suits, then it works just as well in the education system on who is, or isn’t allowed admission.
I don’t need to find mistakes by Democrats to believe the Republican party is still needed. I may be a Republican, but I certainly don’t want the Democratic party to disappear because despite the many faults in our political system, a 2 party system is infinitely preferable to a 1 party system. I think the biggest fault right now is the hyper partisanship that has been created and expanded by social media. If you routinely hear only from people that agree with you the risk is you may start to believe those that disagree with you aren’t just mistaken, they are bad people. I believe there are something on the order of 50 million registered Republicans in the United States. Do you really believe there isn’t a decent person among them? If so that is sad.
The important thing is that the Republicans are fully behind racism, exploitation, and voter suppression. They will say or believe anything, however false, in order to maintain power. Whether every pea-picking last one of them is a bad person is beside the point. The party, as a group, is palpably a force for evil.
I agree with this completely, although I would have thrown in some stuff about Republicans being hired to create an oligarchy for billionaires.
The Republican senator for Wisconsin had the gall to get up and fight an amendment to allow relief to American citizens based on the ‘deficit’, when he himself voted in a tax break of $200,000 to himself with his net worth of $39 million. He vote for huge corporate tax break cuts, wall street bailouts, and huge bloated military industrial budgets – but in a bill that can’t even be called the bare minimum of anything, he’s challenging doing $1200 per person instead of $600. All while people are getting evicted and unemployed, and he has more money than people go through in 50 lifetimes.
This is the party you vote for! When research comes out that shows its proven that trickle down economics only benefits the rich, and Republican’s ignore it while people are about to go homeless and are dying in a pandemic, what do you expect?
Everyone to hold hands and sing along because of some empty platitudes and friendly gestures in person. All while you smile through your teeth at someone about trying to get along, while you take action through voting to make sure their lives are a living hell??
I’m not sure exactly what you define a decent person as, but when the shit over the last few years occurs, what do you expect – a pat on the back and an ‘oh gollee, you’re not so bad after all’?
Why don’t you get out there and go talk to families of victims of Covid and tell them its about civil liberties, and go talk to the people about to be thrown out on the streets about deficits and assure them the wealth will trickle down with those corporate tax cuts one day. Then tell me how decent of a person you are.
Oh, wow, the Republicans are pretending to care about the deficit again? And of course raising taxes on the people with all the money is completely off the table for them?
Well, that was completely and utterly predictable and proof of their enslavement to Big Money. Yep, that party is freaking ESSENTIAL to American democracy. According to Big Money, anyway.
I don’t know the specifics of the amendment Ron Johnson was opposing. But while I won’t mind receiving a $600 payment from the government, I would have preferred if the money had been more directly targeted at people that had been harmed by the pandemic and lockdown. I live on social security disability and some investments. Aside from missing a $530 interest payment last Spring (a bond I own can skip interest payments if certain indexes are down 30% on the coupon date), I haven’t been personally harmed by the pandemic. Lots of people are really hurting and I think it would have been better to for instance increase unemployment payments instead of sending money to everyone.
As for the way so many GOP politicians only seem to care about the deficit during Democratic administrations, I agree it is hypocritical and worthy of condemnation. The problem for voters who do care about the deficit is who do you vote for?
As many Republicans do now, MMc uses the false dichotomy of “if the Republican Party disappears, we will have a one party system, and that is bad” to argue for the continued existence of the Republican Party.
What is is needed is a NEW party, one that might be formed out of those Republicans who fled their party because of Trump and Trumpism, plus conservative Democrats for whom Bernie Sanders is a bridge too far. That would make a lot more sense than retaining what is now a party of racists, loons, and de facto traitors, IMO. But if MMc wants to hang out with that crowd, well, it’s a free country.
And Indy, if you could only find some way to call accused rapists “suspected Antifa terrorists”, you would win your argument in a New York minute. Every Republican knows due process does not apply to those guys. Remember the black vans in Portland? THAT is the Republican idea of due process when they actually care about something.
If you care about the deficit, you vote for the Democrats, since they’re the only party that actually is consistently concerned about. Not every member of the Democrats in Congress, but the clear majority are.
It doesn’t matter whether every Republican is a bad person. The problem is that every Republican IN POWER is a bad person (possibly excepting Romney), and they have a large bunch of gullible sheep that believe their lies.
Right now most of them have even stopped denying that they are evil. Because they are getting caught in lies and scams every day, denial has become useless. Their basic argument now is “the other guys are just as bad,” which really boils down to “the evil stuff we fabricate about Democrats balances out completely with the real evil shit we do,” and then they prattle on about things like Uranium 1 or Crowd Strike or widespread election fraud as if they were real things. (And an alarming number of their followers even believe the utterly silly QAnon stuff, which would require an IQ of approximately 40, give or take 30.)
Who or what keeps conservatives in power or close to it? That’s simple. You don’t require a PhD in Political Science, because Trump now says the quiet part out loud, and reveals all the magician’s secrets: “I love the poorly educated.”
With the exception of the Lincoln Project, Republicans have aided and abetted Trump. thereby abdicating any moral claims for the next generation. Yes, none of them are “decent” people.
Never mind the endless list of previous outrages, this is a man who now is seriously discussing invoking martial law for his personal benefit, and not a peep from the spineless cowards running the Republicans.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not a full-fledged MAGAt:
* if you were in a position of power to make a stand but instead curled up in fetal position every time it mattered (Sasse, Ryan), you’re complicit
*if you waited until you were out of power to make a weak stand (Flake et al), you’re complicit
*if you used Trump to get things you wanted and then plan feign innocence down the line (McConnell, Pence), you’re complicit
*if you consistently make feeble attempts to rationalize Trump through false equivalences, you’re complicit (Michael McC)
I voted against Trump three times (counting the 2016 GOP primary) and condemned him on numerous occasions. But when he has done things I have agreed with, I have said so. Should I have opposed policies I agreed with just because they were put forward by someone I despise? Should I have opposed judicial nominees I believed to have high moral character and judicial philosophies I believe are best for this country?
I really really wish Trump had been a Democrat instead of a Republican. It would have felt so much more satisfying to hate him and I would have felt far less conflicted if I opposed almost everything he did as president. But instead I have done my best not to reflexively oppose or support what he has done as president and I have tried to evaluate things on their own merits. I am sure I have gotten things wrong, but I have tried to get that right. If that makes me complicit, so be it.
Oh you poor poor thing. Well if it’s any consolation Trump has been a Democrat and pro-choice. He just turned his coat once he figured out he’d never get them to nominate him for anything.
I just find it astonishing you’re worried about supposed false claims and ‘innocent students’ lives being ruined, as compared to the thousands and thousands of sexual assault cases that’s have never been reported or the victims ignored. False accusations are extremely rare, so I guess the acceptable tradeoff for you is that unless a women has a videotape showing she was raped, well too bad, you’re fucked.
Preponderance of evidence is the civil suit standard and an appropriate one, because pieces of shit rapists Brock Turner and the legal system find every justification to let individuals like that off the hook even with DEFINITIVE evidence. Go read the hundreds of accounts of sexual assault victims and then go tell them to their face its their fault they didn’t provide ‘clear and convincing’ evidence, tough guy.
In general, DeVos has been nothing but more of the same for the GOP – trying to privatize taxpayer resources for her and her wealthy friends to bankrupt the education system for everyone else.
Yep, they hate the schools, they hate the post office, anything where the government helps people, they hate it. They do anything they can to fuck it up, privatize it, piss & moan about unions, put dickheads in charge who are either actively against it or just incompetent.
Then they come with their “smaller government” horseshit as a “solution”.
It’s a sign of the times that I wasn’t immediately sure if this was satire.
I wasn’t sure even after I started reading. I had to see the “Satire from the Borowitz Report” label. There is nothing beyond belief when it comes to Trump and his crew.
same