Activists on the left have opposed the confirmation of education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos for a host of reasons, some more poorly considered than others. DeVos has spent decades as an activist and philanthropist for school choice, and with the Democratic establishment’s love for teachers unions being second only to their devotion to abortion rights, her nomination was destined to be imperiled from the start. But perhaps the most absurd complaint about DeVos is that she and her husband, Dick, have contributed to the campaigns of senators who will now vote on her nomination.
Breathless coverage presents DeVos’s longstanding support of Republican politicians as a pay-for-play scandal. As Politico suggested in December, after her nomination was announced, “DeVos’ contributions to the lawmakers who will decide her fate stand out in a year in which President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington politics.” That DeVos has been a contributor is undisputed—the Center for Responsive Politics gives a long list of her contributions and her husband’s, some of which have indeed gone to Republicans in the United States Senate. But from this fairly ordinary fact of political life, pundits opposed to DeVos draw two faulty conclusions.
The first is that she is has effectively bought her seat in the cabinet. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how pay-to-play politics works. An article in last week’s Huffington Post by Paul Blumenthal claims that “[s]itting Republican senators have received $115,000 from Betsy DeVos herself, and more than $950,000 from the full DeVos clan since 1980.” That is a lot of money for the privilege of running a bureaucracy full of civil servants who almost uniformly hate her.
It also imagines a long game that is too ridiculous to contemplate. In order to goose the numbers, Blumenthal tallies all of the money DeVos has parted with going back to 1980. That makes the numbers juicier, but it also makes the story more absurd: we are meant to believe that DeVos has been planning this move for three-and-a-half decades, biding her time and cultivating her connections to achieve the singular goal of becoming Secretary of Education.
The list the Huffington Post and countless Facebook firebrands have published also points out a problem in the money-equals-confirmation theory: at least one Republican Senator on that list is voting against DeVos’s confirmation. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski has been a big beneficiary of the DeVos family’s largesse: she received $43,200 in the past election cycle. Blumenthal credits Murkowski’s opposition to “the volume of opposition her nomination elicited” among Murkowski’s constituents. A more likely story, as Bill McMorris pointed out in the Washington Free Beacon, is that Murkowski is among those rare Republicans who receive support from teachers’ unions; in her case, $23,500 worth. After walking the tightrope between the education establishment and school choice reformers, Murkowski has cast her lot with the less lucrative, but more numerous labor union members. So much for the power of campaign donations.
The second, larger problem with this line of attack is that it falls into the trap common among Trump administration critics of assuming that nothing Trump does has ever been done before. Occasionally, that is the case; Trump is not your everyday politician. More often, though, the latest outrage from the Trump White House is no more than a conventional political act that went nearly unremarked-upon though eight years of Barack Obama’s administration. Nominating megadonors to the cabinet is no exception.
Obama’s cabinet had fewer of the super-rich than Trump’s, as he tended to favor appointments of career politicians or bureaucrats, rather than the political outsiders Trump prefers. But, especially in the second term, Obama still found spots for a few big-time bundlers and donors, none more prominent than billionaire Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. Pritzker, like DeVos, is a philanthropist and the heir to a great fortune—in a 2014 story, Fortune called her “stratospherically wealthy.” She donated to Obama’s 2008 campaign early and often, and helped to raise millions more from other donors.
In the meantime, Pritzker also donated to a good portion of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. A Chicagoan, the biggest target for her monetary assistances was her hometown Senator, Dick Durbin, who received $12,100 from her over the years. Pritzker’s husband, Bryan Traubert, gave an additional $8,200 to Durbin and other members of the extended Pritzker clan donated even more. Durbin got the most from the future cabinet member, but he was far from the only Senator she bankrolled. Pritzker and her husband gave nearly $100,000 to Senators who voted on her confirmation. That does not include the more than $100,000 she gave to the DNC, the DSCC, and the DCCC. Nor does it include donations to state party machines, nor the fundraisers she hosted, nor the contributions of her other family members.
The Center for Responsive Politics noted this connection, but few others did. Andy Kroll covered the story for Mother Jones with a sigh of business-as-usual boredom. “A president naming one of his top fundraisers to a cabinet position is not uncommon in Washington” he wrote, “fundraisers and donors are often rewarded with ambassadorships—or, in a few cases, cabinet jobs. This is how a winning presidential candidate thanks his biggest supporters. Indeed, folks who fundraise for a presidential campaign often go into the process eyeing a plush gig on the other side—if their candidate wins, of course.” The story even goes on to say that Pritzker explicitly wanted the Commerce job, and was irked not to get it immediately in 2009. But, to update the old Nixon line: When Obama does it, it’s not a crime.
DeVos’s enemies in the education establishment have thrown the kitchen sink at her, but she may succeed in being confirmed despite the frantic opposition. The commotion over her political donations is nothing but a fig leaf to obscure the naked self-interest that their opposition is based upon. DeVos and her signature issue, school choice, represent a threat to teachers unions unlike any they have seen since the days of Al Shanker. A concerned citizen with the means to do so will make political donations: that is not news, nor is it scandalous. It happened in the Obama administration, and in many cabinets before his. The only scandal here is how far teachers unions will go to preserve the status quo in American education.
