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Education

Republican Congresswoman Likens Regulations Of For-Profit Colleges To The Holocaust

By Scott Keyes on Feb 6, 2013 at 3:15 pm

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC)

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) compared efforts to regulate the for-profit college industry to the Holocaust during a speech Tuesday. Speaking at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, Foxx invoked a famous Holocaust maxim in order to defend for-profit colleges against increased scrutiny. “They came for the for-profits, and I didn’t speak up,” the North Carolina congresswoman said.

Insider Higher Ed has the details:

In criticizing the private college presidents, Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who leads the subcommittee on higher education, adapted the famous statement from the German theologian Martin Niemöller on Germans who ignored Nazi persecution. (“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.”)

“‘They came for the for-profits, and I didn’t speak up…’” Foxx said. “Nobody really spoke up like they should have.”

Even if her choice of words is shocking, her willingness to stand up for the industry is of little surprise. Foxx is heavily-financed by the for-profit college industry. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported, “In her first year on the [Higher Education and Workforce Training] subcommittee, Foxx picked up at least $48,668 from PACs or individuals affiliated with for-profit colleges.”

Though Foxx is readily willing to advocate on behalf of an industry that saddles students with debt and leaves them with few employment prospects, she paradoxically dislikes people who take out student loans. Said Foxx on a radio show last year, “I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.” In fact, many of the students with such large amounts of debt can trace their troubles to the fact that largely unregulated for-profit colleges are extraordinarily expensive.

Foxx is no back-bencher in the GOP caucus. She was elected to her party’s leadership last year to serve as Secretary for the House Republican Conference and has been touted as a possible Senate candidate in 2014.

NEWS FLASH

Over 111,000 People Have Signed A Petition Denouncing Rep. Foxx’s Disparaging Comments About People With Student Loans | Earlier this month, ThinkProgress first reported Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) remarks showing distaste for people with large student loans. “I have very little tolerance” for them, Foxx declared on a conservative radio show. Her comments have since been widely criticized, including in a speech by President Obama earlier this week. Rebuild the Dream also began a petition drive to denounce Foxx; in less than two weeks, over 111,000 people have added their names.

Education

GOP Rep. Foxx, Who Has ‘Very Little Tolerance’ For People With Student Loans, Is Heavily-Financed By For-Profit Colleges

By Scott Keyes on Apr 19, 2012 at 6:50 pm

Last week, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the House subcommittee on higher education, said she has “very little tolerance” for people with high amounts of student loans. The Center for Responsive Politics did some digging into her campaign donations and found that the North Carolina congresswoman is heavily-financed by the for-profit education industry:

In her first year on the [Higher Education and Workforce Training] subcommittee, Foxx picked up at least $48,668 from PACs or individuals affiliated with for-profit colleges. We counted 22 companies or trade associations in the for-profit college industry on the list of her top contributors, including: Bridgepoint Education, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the Apollo Group (which owns the University of Phoenix) and student loan lender NelNet Inc.

As we’ve noted, for-profit schools engage in aggressive recruiting and marketing tactics to find new students, who are often left with huge amounts of student debt and bleak job prospects. Ironically, for-profit colleges are significantly more expensive than community colleges and many public universities. In other words, for-profit colleges actually encourage the large student loans for which Foxx claims she has no tolerance.

Foxx made no mention of her ties to the for-profit college’s during the radio interview. Instead, her explanation for why she had “very little tolerance” for people who have to take out large student loans to pay for college was that she didn’t have to. “I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money,” she said.

However, as the Quick and the Ed found, when Foxx attended the University of North Carolina in the 1960s, tuition was $87.50 per semester, or $671.30 today after adjusting for inflation. Since then, the cost of higher education has soared. A recent report showed that the cost of college tuition and fees has nearly sextupled over the last 25 years, rising far quicker than medical costs, gasoline, and other consumer items.

Rebuild The Dream started a petition calling on members of Congress to denounce Foxx’s remarks. At publication time, more than 61,000 people had signed it.

Education

Rep. Virginia Foxx On People With Student Loans: ‘I Have Very Little Tolerance’ For Them

By Scott Keyes on Apr 13, 2012 at 6:45 pm

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) took on a unique enemy during a radio interview yesterday: people with student loans.

Though many politicians sympathize with those who are saddled with exorbitant student debt, Foxx, who chairs the House subcommittee on higher education, had a different take. Appearing on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, the North Carolina congresswoman recounted her own experience paying for college, where she worked her way through and graduated after seven years. Foxx then pointed to her own experience as justification for why she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt.” “There’s no reason for that,” she concluded:

FOXX: I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.

Listen to it:

Despite Foxx’s implication, these loans are not taken out frivolously. They are taken out because of the soaring cost of college. In other words, because the price of college is so high — and House Republicans are working overtime to cut Pell grants for one million low-income students — the amount of loans required to pay for it is also high. Indeed, student loan debt topped one trillion dollars last year, orders of magnitude larger than in the decades prior.

Still, Foxx’s distaste for large loans does not appear to extend to the mortgage sector. In Foxx’s 2010 financial disclosure statement, she owned two individual mortgage notes worth up to $250,000 each, from which she earned as much as $20,000 in payments.

Health

Praising ‘Let Women Die’ Bill, GOP Rep Says ‘Nobody Has Ever Fought More For The Rights Of Woman Than I Have’

By Tanya Somanader on Oct 14, 2011 at 11:55 am

GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC)

Foregoing any interest in getting America back to work, House Republicans continued their campaign against women’s health yesterday by passing the “Protect Life Act.” Known as the “Let Woman Die” act to women’s health advocates, the radical measure would allow hospitals that receive federal funds to reject any pregnant woman seeking an abortion in any circumstance, even if it is necessary to save her life.

On the House floor before the vote, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) — who revealed earlier this year that she had to have an abortion for medical reasons — rebuked Republicans for a bill that “goes to the farthest extreme in trying to take women down, not just a peg, but take them in shackles to some cave somewhere.” Republicans are basically saying, “‘‘Oh, except for a woman who is in need of an abortion, or except for a woman who is bleeding to death who happens to be pregnant. Or except for a woman who is miscarrying,’” she declared. “It’s absolutely misogynist.”

But North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) was having none of it. This bill “takes away no protections from women in this country,” she insisted. “It takes away no rights. It is not extreme.” Declaring herself to be foremost defender of women’s rights, Foxx countered that pro-choice advocates are actually misogynists because “fifty percent of the unborn babies being aborted are females”:

FOXX: For my colleagues across the aisle who say this is a misogynist bill, nobody has ever fought more for the rights of women than I have. But fifty percent of the unborn babies that are being aborted are females. So the misogyny comes from those that promote the killing of unborn babies. That’s where the misogyny comes in.

Watch it:

The bizarre logic of Foxx’s misogyny argument is not even in the vicinity of fact. The majority of abortions in the U.S. occur around the 10th week, well before gender is definitively known. There is no data — let alone evidence — to back up her claim.

But her claim that “nobody has ever fought more for the rights than I have” throws facts straight out the window. As Raw Story notes, Foxx voted against women’s health bills at least nine times in her congressional career, including a vote against funding for Planned Parenthood — an organization with the chief purpose of providing cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease tests and treatment to low-income women. Along with lowering costs and free preventive care, the health care law also prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage women “due to pre-existing conditions, such as cancer and having been pregnant.” Foxx, however, believes such health reforms pose a greater danger than “any terrorist.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told Republicans that a vote for this bill is a vote “to say that women can die on the floor of health care providers.” And Foxx is fighting for women to have that chance.

NEWS FLASH

Virginia Foxx Calls For DOMA Reinforcement In Defense Bill | Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) has proposed an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations Bill (HR 2219) that would reinforce the effect of the Defense of Marriage Act throughout the Department of Defense. The Foxx-Burton Amendment reads: “No funds under the act may be used for activities in contravention of Public Law 104-199, the Defense of Marriage Act” (PDF). The House will debate the bill later today.

Politics

Rep. Virginia Foxx: I ‘Certainly Agree’ That We ‘Need A Dragnet Put Out’ For Undocumented Immigrants

By Tanya Somanader on Jun 9, 2010 at 5:09 pm

foxxyLast month, Republicans launched a “listening” campaign called America Speaking Out, an effort to allow the public to give them ideas on their national agenda. As part of the campaign, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) — who has gained notoriety for her hateful bigotry — hosted a tele-townhall last night to give her North Carolina constituents “a seat at the table.” During the event, Foxx endorsed one caller’s paranoid fear of immigrants:

CALLER: First, I appreciate what you do. Watching TV and seeing all the illegals streaming into the United States and hearing that they’re not only from Mexico but from Afghanistan and other countries, I wonder how many terrorists are in our own country right now plotting to kill us.

FOXX: A lot…a lot.

CALLER: I want the borders to Mexico sealed tight and I want a dragnet put out for these people to see if we can’t catch ‘em.

FOXX: You are very much in the majority in this country and you and I certainly agree on that. I would encourage you to let your senators know that…again we have no disagreement on that.

Listen here:

Other callers seized the opportunity to speak out about their own offensive opinions on the issues of the day. One caller argued that a better crackdown on companies “hiring illegals” would “cause illegals to deport themselves” and “get rid of all the anchor babies.” Another denounced welfare as a program for “young women who make a virtual career out of having babies out of wedlock and getting paid for it.”

America Speaking Out projects are a magnet for the “odd and offensive.” At his America Speaking Out town hall in California last week, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who chairs the initiative, heard from conservatives who celebrated Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “inhumane” and “brutal” tent prisons as good policy.

As ThinkProgress previously noted, the GOP’s America Speaking Out website discourages “suggestions on amnesty or a path to legalization for illegal immigrants” but seems to welcome anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Politics

Obama Reprimands GOP: Stop Saying ‘This Guy’s Doing All Kinds Of Crazy Stuff…To Destroy America’

By Igor Volsky on Jan 29, 2010 at 2:30 pm

This afternoon, during a conciliatory visit with the House Republicans, President Obama suggested that the party’s bitter political attacks prevented any possibility of negotiation or compromise on health care reform. “If you were to listen to the debate, and frankly how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this was some Bolshevik plot,” Obama said. He added:

If the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me. I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you — if you voted with the administration on something — are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own Party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion. Because, what you’ve been telling your constituents is: this guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America.

Watch it:

Obama described the health reform legislation as “a plan that is pretty centrist” and pointed out that it already incorporated modified versions of Republican proposals. He said that the legislation reflected the basic elements of a plan introduced in June of last year by a bipartisan group of former Senate Majority Leaders and reminded Republicans that they would have to negotiate with Democrats to incorporate their ideas into the final legislation. “Most independent observers would say” it is “similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton,” Obama added. In 1994, then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole proposed alternatives that included an individual mandate, subsidies for lower income Americans and benefit standards “at least equal to those offered federal employees.”

Throughout the health care debate, House Republicans have resorted to sensational rhetoric and deceitful attacks. In July, Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) said that “Democrats released a health care bill which essentially said to America’s seniors: Drop dead.” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) predicted that “people die when they’re in line [for health care services],” and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) infamously said that the Democrats health care reform would “put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

Update

“I give the president an enormous amount of credit, because I’m sure that there wasn’t a person in the room that’s been elected that hasn’t had to go in to an adversarial setting, and be heavily outnumbered and yet stay that long and take those questions,” said Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), chair of the GOP’s policy committee.

Health

Rep. Virginia Foxx Suggests It’s Better To Be Uninsured Than On Medicaid

By Igor Volsky on Nov 6, 2009 at 5:15 pm

During this afternoon’s Rules Committee hearing to determine which amendments would be introduced during floor debate of the House health care bill, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) suggested that it’s better to be uninsured than enrolled in the government’s Medicaid program. “I want to ask you if you know that Medicaid patients visit the emergency room at twice the rate of uninsured patients in this country,” she said. “More government paid insurance is going to increase the number of people going to the emergency rooms.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) responded, “I thank the gentlelady for making the case for keeping more people in this country uninsured. And I guess if that’s the Republican position, then fine”:

MCGOVERN: If you don’t have insurance then you have no choice but to go to the emergency room. But what we’re also trying to do is to put in place kind of a system, as Mr. Rangel said, that encourage prevention, and preventative care, so that people can actually not get sick and not end up in emergency rooms. So if you want to make the case that more and more people in this country should be uninsured, fine. I just disagree with you.

Watch the exchange:

“I’m making the case that your bill doesn’t insure anywhere near what our bill does, and I think that is unacceptable and is wrong in this country,” McGovern said, hinting that under the Republican alternative, the number of uninsured Americans would increase to 52 million by 2019.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) explained that “one of the things that this bill does is make major increase in the reimbursement rate so that it gets up to the Medicare level, and even beyond, and that means that doctors will now take these Medicaid patients, they’ll get primary care, they’ll get to see a doctor on a regular basis and they won’t go to the emergency room.”

Politics

Rep. Foxx Says Congress Has No Business Reforming Health Care: It’s Just A ‘Distraction’

By Amanda Terkel on Aug 21, 2009 at 3:03 pm

vfoxx Yesterday in a “telephone town hall,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) not only repeated her opposition to Democratic proposals for health care reform, but characterized all federal government incursions into health care as unconstitutional. In fact, she said that attempting reform was nothing more than a “distraction” from more important issues:

FOXX: The Constitution doesn’t grant a right to health care, and most of us are living as much by the Constitution as we can. It also doesn’t give the federal government the authority to deal with health care. As you may know, the 10th amendment, it says if it isn’t mentioned in the Constitution to be done by the federal government, it’s left to the states or the people. [...]

I think one of the problems we have in this country right now is the fact that the federal government is trying to do too much. We need to leave things to the states and the localities. … And unfortunately, we are distracting ourselves from looking after the defense of this nation because we are dealing with issues that should, by right, be the state and individual’s.

Foxx, of course, also thinks the current health care system in America is so “good” that it couldn’t really get much better. “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare,” Foxx said last month. “Everybody in this country has access to healthcare.” (She’s wrong.)

Foxx is right that the Constitution never explicitly says the words “health care.” But as Ian Millhiser has pointed out, Article I does give Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” and to “provide for….the general welfare of the United States.” “Rather than itemizing specific subject matters, such as health care, which Congress is allowed to spend money on,” notes Millhiser, “the framers chose instead to give Congress a broad mandate to spend money in ways that promote the ‘general welfare.’”

Of course, Foxx doesn’t seem to have a problem with Medicare. When Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) proposed an amendment to kill this government-run program, neither Foxx nor any other Republican voted for it.

Transcript: Read more

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