Political Quotes

“I rise today in opposition to the nomination of Steven Menashi to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 2017 to 2018, Mr. Menashi served as the Acting General Counsel of the Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos. Mr. Menashi has stated that, in this role, he was ``responsible for providing legal advice related to all aspects of the Department's operations, including litigation, rulemaking, regulation, and enforcement.'' Before Mr. Menashi joined the Department of Education, the Department had found that thousands of students had been defrauded by for-profit colleges. The for-profit schools had lied to students about job prospects, graduation rates, and steered them into mountains of debt. The Department had concluded that these students were entitled to relief from their student loan debt. But when Mr. Menashi arrived at the Department, he took a different view. He wrote a memo, which has since been obtained by the New York Times, arguing against full debt relief for the students. Many of these students found themselves unable to work in the fields that they had pursued at the for-profit colleges because the colleges had either suddenly closed or the degrees had proven to be worthless. Nonetheless, Mr. Menashi's idea, which the Department adopted, was to use the private Social Security earnings data of the defrauded students as a basis for limiting their relief. Even if you put aside the unfairness of Mr.…”