Betsy DeVos, who has about as many qualifications to be Secretary of Education as I do to be King of Sweden, has taken on the only role that matters in a Trump administration—destroying, whenever and wherever you can, any vestige of the legacy of President Barack Obama, who made the history-changing mistake of once ridiculing the president* in front of all of official Washington. Broadly brings us Exhibit A:

While the Department of Education has scheduled meetings with sexual assault advocate groups such as the National Women's Law Center, Know Your IX, and End Rape on Campus, they have also reached out to SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, Families Advocating for Campus Equality, and National Coalition for Men, a group that describes itself as "dedicated to the removal of harmful gender-based stereotypes, especially as they impact boys, men, their families and those who love them. According to ThinkProgress, the National Coalition for Men has previously published the photos and names of women while calling them "false accusers." NCFM also backed a bill that removed protections or LGBTQ people in crisis centers and have sued women's groups for meeting without men. ThinkProgress also details how SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, is listed as a misogynistic website by the Southern Poverty Law Center and in 2013 published an article claiming that civil rights had been "undermined by domestic violence laws."

Look, there are people with serious due-process concerns about how universities handle student-on-student complaints. Having been connected with one particularly egregious case a few years ago, I'm one of them. (For that matter, I have due-process concerns about how the abridgments of civil liberties have been subcontracted to the people for whom we all work and, generally, to almost every power center in the country.) DeVos could find these people and talk to them. But these are not the serious people. These are the cheap seats hecklers and the direct-mail vandals. The only reason to bring these people to the table is to help you demolish the protections put in place by the Obama administration for the simple sake of demolishing them.

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Things get even worse when you look at what DeVos is up to with student loans and for-profit colleges. The Obama administration put in place rules to protect students from the depredations of Trump Universi…er…for-profit colleges. DeVos, who's a big fan of for-profit higher education, has decided to suspend these rules. This has resulted in her being sued by the attorneys general from 18 states. From ABC News:

The rules would have forbidden schools from forcing students to sign agreements that waive their right to sue. Defrauded students would have faced a quicker path to get their loans erased, and schools, not taxpayers, could have been held responsible for the costs. A final version of the rules was announced last fall after nearly two years of negotiations. The Obama administration started pursuing new rules after the Corinthian Colleges chain shut down in 2015 amid allegations of misconduct, leading to a flood of applications from students seeking to get their loans forgiven.

She's also being sued by a woman from Oregon, as Time reports.

Niesha Wright, a 40-year-old mother of two, graduated last year from the now-defunct ITT Technical Institute with what her lawsuit calls "worthless, non-transferable credits and a mountain of student loan debt." She attended ITT Tech from September 2014 to June 2016, graduating with an associate's degree about two months before the for-profit college shut down after former President Barack Obama's Education Department accused the school of putting students at financial risk and banned it from enrolling new students who receive federal financial aid.

But, again, these are Obama administration rules. So they must be destroyed. That it will make and/or save some of Betsy DeVos's friends a lot of dough is just a bonus. There was a hearing on this whole mess on Monday and, if NPR is to be believed, DeVos made no new friends.

On Monday, speaker after speaker in favor of the rules expressed weariness at the reopening of a "negotiated rulemaking" process that took several years and much legal wrangling. "I can't believe we're here again," Alexis Goldstein of Americans for Financial Reform, a consumer rights advocacy group, said at the first public comment hearing this week. A second hearing will take place today from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET in Dallas. Monday's all-day hearing marked the beginning of a "regulatory reset" announced by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last month on two rules designed to protect borrowers from predatory for-profit colleges: the "gainful employment" rule sanctions individual programs at colleges and universities based on how many students are able to pay back their loans; the "borrower defense to repayment" rule smooths the way for students to get their loans forgiven if their college is found to engage in fraudulent behavior, a situation that has befallen tens of thousands of students at Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, among others, in the last few years.

All the way down.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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