The Democrats Stayed Up All Night Fighting Betsy DeVos
By Charles P. Pierce
Talking is the only real tool they have at this point.
Betsy DeVos, a wealthy Republican donor with almost no experience in public education, was confirmed by the Senate as the nation’s Education Secretary on Tuesday, but only with the help of a historic tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence after weeks of protests and two defections within her own party.
The 51-to-50 vote capped an all-night vigil on the Senate floor, where, one by one, Democrats denounced Ms. DeVos to a mostly empty chamber. But they did not get a third Republican defection that would have stopped Ms. DeVos — a billionaire who has devoted much of her life to promoting charter schools and vouchers — from becoming the steward of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools.
It was the first time a vice president has been summoned to the Capitol to break a tie on a cabinet nomination.
The Democrats kept talking and talking, which really is all the American voters left them to do in the autumn of 2016.
WASHINGTON—As Monday became Tuesday, and the rattle of the custodial carts grew louder across the marble floors of the Capitol, Robert Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was talking about sexual assault on college campuses and about the regulations designed to prevent the crimes and help the victims. This, along with so much else, had baffled Betsy DeVos, the president*'s nominee to be the next Secretary of Education, during the committee hearings into her nomination.
(She didn't really know what she was talking about on this particular subject, or on the subject of the guarantees made in federal law to help students with disabilities, or on the subject that has been the most basic question in education going back to Plato: namely, do you measure a student's performance—and, by extension, a teacher's effectiveness—by the student's proficiency or the student's growth? It wasn't that DeVos failed to stake out a position on this question and defend it. It was that she clearly didn't know what the debate was all about. Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, was more flummoxed than I ever saw him, and this was a guy who used to do live comedy on TV.)
Here's Casey:
This is the line of questioning that I pursued with Mrs. DeVos when she came before the HELP committee—the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee—just a couple of days ago. I want to start with the stark reality of sexual assault on college and university campuses across the country. Here's what the Centers for Disease Control tell us. One in five women on college campuses experience attempted or completed sexual assaults. One in five. Now, that's an abomination. That's a stain on our country. That's something we should not allow to continue, and we're just beginning in the last couple of years to begin to tackle that horrific problem, that insult, that outrage to young women and their families all across the country. We pass legislation that I will talk about in a moment, but this is a matter I believe of basic justice…Years ago, St. Augustine said without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? If we don't get serious about this problem, the problem of sexual assault and what happens to young women on our college campuses.
Specifically, I asked her to uphold the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights guidance from 2011 that advises institutions of higher education to use the preponderance of evidence standard for campus conduct proceedings. Some people know the difference between one level of evidentiary standards versus others. They made a determination that preponderance of the evidence was the right standard. I asked her a very specific question whether or not she would uphold that standard of evidentiary—that basic evidentiary standard, and she said it was—quote—premature so make such a commitment. I also asked her whether she would enforce the law as it relates to sexual assault, and she didn't seem to believe that she had to answer that question in a manner that would give us confidence that she would uphold the law.
OK, it was a little early in the morning for St. Augustine, but Casey made his point. Thus we were here all night, as Monday became Tuesday, because the Democratic senators believe that Betsy DeVos' ridiculous nomination was the one they could beat. All week, the plan is to slow-play the confirmation votes to let public outrage and pressure build while, in the Senate, the Democrats would use every millisecond of the 30 hours of "debate" they are allowed before a confirmation vote is taken. This, of course, is not a "debate" in a real sense. The Democrats divvied up their allotted time and each Democratic senator had an hour to spout off to a largely empty chamber.
Meanwhile, even in a largely empty Capitol, the rumors flew. Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, was wavering. The cellphones belonging to the staff of Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, had melted into the sides of their heads. Maybe Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, can be flipped back. The smart money remained on the notion that, in a move unprecedented in a Cabinet confirmation, Vice-President Mike Pence would be forced to perform his only constitutional duty and break a 50-50 tie. The Democrats kept talking and talking, which really is all the American voters left them to do in the autumn of 2016.
Each of them had a point to make, and they made it at length, with practically no opposition from the Republican majority, the majority of which were somewhere tucked away for a long winter's nap. Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, came rolling in around midnight to add his two cents to the proceedings, defending DeVos by avoiding talking about her at any length. Instead, Scott insisted that the "real debate" should be about the issues concerning public education.
This is not about teachers. It is not necessarily about Betsy DeVos, not even Betsy DeVos. For me, the issue is simply an issue of quality education, and I will, without any question, have a very specific conversation on Betsy DeVos. For me, however, this is simply about quality education and how we get there. My story is familiar to many people in this chamber. I've spoken about it on a number of times. I'll tell you that my entire time in the senate, the four years that I've been here, Ive been talking consistently about the power of education and the necessity of quality education. I call it the Opportunity Agenda, the Opportunity Agenda which has been my focus for the last four year's focus, first, on education, making sure that every single zip code in America has a quality choice in education.
This is a nice try, and Tim Scott must have been one hellacious goddamn Amway salesman. Yes, in one of the wonders of coincidence for which American politics is noted around the world, Scott once went door-to-door on behalf of the company that made the DeVos family wealthy enough so that, when Betsy married into it, she and her husband could afford to buy the political establishment of the state of Michigan wholesale while also embarking on Betsy's golden dream of using public education to "build God's kingdom."
Scott gave it his all, and gave the DeVos family a fine return on the nearly $50,000 in direct contributions that the DeVos family has lavished upon him. (One of the most interesting statistics of this 115th Congress is that the DeVos family has dropped almost a million bucks on various senators who will vote to give Betsy a job or not.) Unfortunately for Scott, of course, the actual subject of all the jaw-jaw was whether or not to turn Betsy DeVos loose to pursue her dream further as the head of the Department of Education, and the multifarious reasons as to why that's a really bad idea were parceled out by the Democratic leadership at about one per senator.
They let the younger folks have the overnight shift. (It would have made no sense to drag, say, 76-year old Pat Leahy out in the late whiskey hours to talk at length about anything.) For example, Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, and a senatorial stripling at 44, used his time to deliver a thwacking attack on the privatization of the commons in general, and the creeping influence of the private profit motive into education in particular, using the DeVos-enabled catastrophe in Michigan as a case study.
A 2014 investigation by the Detroit Free Press suggests their profits are enormous. During the 2013 school year, the paper found Detroit public schools spend an average of $12,000 per student in the classroom. Charter schools spent about $2,000 less per pupil, getting the same amount of money. They are spending $2,000 less per kid, yet spent double that rate on per-pupil funding on administrative costs. That's their skim. That's their profit. Meanwhile, the oversupply of seats in for-profit schools has arguably kept nonprofit charter networks with better track records off the market.
So they really are operating like a business. They are operating like an airline, right? They are operating like a credit card company, a financial services company. I mean, this is the private sector at work in public education. There are some private sector models where I think, hey, let's have a partnership with the Department of Education to try to see how much clean energy we can develop. Let's work with the Department of Commerce on export promotion. But there are some aspects of what the government does that are not a good fit with the private sector, and this is one of them. And this isn't some ideological test. This is—it's just not working. We're ripping off our taxpayers and we're giving a bad value to the students who deserve better.
(This, it should be said, was partly in response to Scott, a very smooth operator, who glided easily from support for charter schools to support for "school choice," using as his inapt comparison the Pell Grant program, reminding us that his Republican colleague, James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said the same thing about the GI Bill. Schatz correctly pointed out that what Scott called "school choice" is privatization in sheep's clothing.)
It was a little after three when Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, rose to speak. I feel fairly safe in observing that speaking on Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education was not what Kaine thought he'd be doing at the beginning of February in 2017. Nevertheless, Kaine built on what Schatz had said, tracing the evolution of school vouchers back to their roots in the segregation academies in the South that arose in response to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which mandated the desegregation of the country's public schools.
Kaine leaned particularly hard on the history of Prince Edward County, which simply closed all of its public schools for five years rather than comply with the court's decision. This, at least, had more historical validity than calling the GI Bill and Pell Grants examples of "school choice." Said Kaine:
Prince Edward County did something that no other jurisdiction in the United States did. They decided, okay, if we have public schools, we're required to treat kids equally based on the color of their skin, I have an idea—we'll close all our public schools. So Prince Edward County for a period of five years—five years—shut all their public schools. And you know what they did? They used county funds and state funds to support vouchers to private schools. And they gave those vouchers to students who were white so that they could go to private schools. They called them Segregation Academies, and they set up all over Virginia…We've gone from back of the pack to front of the pack. We care about public education in my Commonwealth. And we do not take kindly to people who trash the state of public education today because we know how far we've come.
There was some bone-deep serious politics going on in the strange, chilly Senate chamber, witnessed only by the presiding officer, some sleepy pages, and the guy running the sound system. (My pal Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, took over the president's chair while Kaine was speaking.) The assumption behind all this post-midnight rambling is that, while the Democrats were speaking, and Tim Kaine was talking about segregation academies, their constituents were still calling the offices of sleeping Republicans. The night became the day, slowly. Senators kept talking. You could hear the day begin in the rising buzz coming from the hallways, where sunlight was just beginning to creep down across the marble floors.