Democrats on the Senate’s education panel toed the line Tuesday morning, bringing along a fighting spirit with their votes against Betsy DeVos’s nomination to lead the Department of Education. As foretold, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee recommended her confirmation to the full Senate without a single Democrat’s support.
Right after Chairman Lamar Alexander spoke of his trust in the committee and the nominee’s commitment to public education, Ranking Member Patty Murray and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said the very near opposite: that the confirmation of DeVos could only mean the end of bipartisan cooperation on education policy.
Meanwhile, the implementation of the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act—which restores agency to states—remains the best defense against the radical top-down changes members of both parties oppose. The runaway federal overreach it would take to mandate a universal voucher program, for instance, is not in the best interest of public education reform or in the spirit of the law which DeVos has pledged to uphold.
“The more I spoke with my teachers around the state, the more I realized we were not having the right conversation,” said South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who said he’s answered countless calls from constituents concerned about the nominee. “We were debating Betsy DeVos as if Betsy DeVos can single-handedly, according to some on the left, change the education system in America. This is patently false. She does not have that power,” he said.
“As a matter of fact, what she has said consistently is that she would rather return the power to the states, which is the right direction for education.”
Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—the likeliest Republicans to oppose DeVos—sought assurance of the same. Neither Collins nor Murkowski, both of whom expressed concerns that DeVos champions vouchers too much and does not fully understand the needs of public schools, would offer their full support. But they both voted in favor of her nomination.
Georgia senator Johnny Isakson, similarly, offered his favorable recommendation incumbent on DeVos’s continuing commitment to respect and uphold federal law protecting students with disabilities.
Isakson, a Republican, expressed his agreement with Democratic senator Tim Kaine that every student in every type of school should have an individual education plan—a policy currently not required of private schools. Having demonstrated her commitment to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, in a letter to Isakson, he said of DeVos, “I think she does now understand with the level of intensity which I and a lot of members of this committee, I think every member, share, in terms of IDEA and education.”
“I’m going to work as hard as I can to make sure that where she is short on knowledge as secretary I will be there to give her that knowledge,” Isakson assured.
Kaine, perhaps practicing his lines for later Tuesday, when President Trump is set to announce his selection to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, diverged from this area of common concern to cast Democrats’ opposition to DeVos as a proportional response to Republicans’ never having held a hearing to confirm Merrick Garland. “It’s very important that we treat nominees on an even footing,” he said, presaging further reciprocity.
Democratic senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, meanwhile, paraphrased DeVos and her boosters on the subject of educational options for poor and minority children, “a profound national interest,” and, then, in fitting with the minority’s ur-strategy, voted against her confirmation.
The HELP Committee—even when they were tied up in a squabble over whether Utah senator Orrin Hatch’s proxy vote for DeVos (Hatch, who has strong views of his own about attendance, had briefly left the room) should count—did agree on holding DeVos to the letter of the law in the interest of school children’s success and safety.
A distracting campaign against her oligarchic wiles obscured the central fact that equal opportunity for American children is their shared goal. As Minnesota senator Al Franken revealed last week, it’s not so much a substantive objection as a partisan strategy, calibrated to console the progressive base, that their collective “nay” vote serves.
