Vice President Mike Pence made history being the first vice president ever to break a tie on a Senate vote for an executive Cabinet appointment on Tuesday.
Two Senate Republicans had broken ranks with their party to vote against the confirmation of Elizabeth ”Betsy” DeVos, president Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education, leading to a 50-50 split. Before the confirmation vote, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talkathon” in protest, another first for an executive cabinet nominee.
But such actions were futile since, as per the Constitution, Pence only has one practical role in the Senate — and tie-breaking is it.
In the immediate political sense, tie-breaking like this is necessary for congress to function due to a political divide being amplified to the point of intractability thanks to pressure from constituents on both sides.
With a narrow majority of 52 Republicans in the 100-seat Senate, it’s quite likely that Pence is going to fulfill this function quite a bit going forward. Three Republicans need to be flipped on any given vote for the Dems to have their way, a bipartisan bridge that’s so small, and yet so far away due to the ever growing partisan divide.
Earlier hearings for Dr. Ben Carson’s nomination to run the department of Housing and Urban Development saw Democrats who approved of Carson receiving massive amounts of flak from their base. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) went on Facebook to defend her decision to vote for Carson after coming under fire, while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) received praise from left-leaning bloggers for taking a total resistance stance on all of Trump’s nominees.
On the conservative side of things, Republicans are under the same pressures to rubber stamp anything, or anyone, Trump wants. Trump won Indiana “bigly,” and Sen. Joe Donnelly (R-IN), up for reelection in 2018, knows this. Donnelly told the Associated Press on Feb. 8, “My job is to do what Hoosiers want me to do.”
Support bases pushing Republicans to be an unstoppable force and Democrats to be an immoveable object isn’t exactly new, it’s just the opposite sides taking the same stances from the Obama years with more than a touch of hypocrisy included.
Remember when causing gridlock in Congress was bad? I ‘member.
But with Democrats on such shaky ground, the only outcome is a setup for further failure. This will help reinforce the current victimization narrative on the left of, “Trump’s using totalitarian tactics!” which, in turn, pushes their base ever deeper into the partisan divide.
On the larger philosophical level, DeVos has become a flashpoint, even among many other controversial Trump nominees, because she represents an almost distilled antithesis to prior appointees. The potential for fundamental changes made by the federal government regarding following DeVos’ appointment is very real.
DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist activist from Michigan, has a very long history of promoting the “school choice” movement in education – a movement that promotes breaking down numerous traditions of the educational system by promoting school voucher programs, scholarship tax credit programs, private schools and homeschooling as an alternative to public schools. And while she has a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and Political Science, she has no experience working with public education.
Considering this history, it’s very likely that DeVos’ role isn’t so much as to manage the annual $68 million budget of the Dept. of Education, so much as to kill as much of it as possible.
Which of course is why Democrats and teacher’s unions are freaking out and turning up the heat. If DeVos begins trimming back the department, it could destroy our children’s fragile lives!
Right?
Oh, no, wait – the amount of influence the Dept. of Education has on actual public schools is actually pretty limited, at least financially. According to the department’s website, only an average of about 10 percent of the budget for K-12 schools comes from federal funds, the vast majority comes from states themselves. If DeVos literally stopped all federal funding entirely, public schools would still exist, and very likely, states would step in to fill in the gaps.
More important are regulations that the federal system mandates for schools across the country. Acts like Title IX, which became increasingly controversial in its application under Obama, are likely to be less rigorously promoted or mandated from the federal government, though DeVos said during her hearing that it would be “premature” to make a decision on it.
So why all the brouhaha? Well, it might have more to do with the fact that DeVos and her family have had a long history of donating to the Republican party over many years. To the tune of a potential $200 million dollars, a number DeVos said “was possible” during her confirmation hearings.
This sounds horrifying to Democrats, a terrible amount of money to influence government!
To Republicans, the Democrats are hypocrites. They point to the fact that teacher’s unions across the country donate massive amounts of money to Democrats. According to Open Secrets.org, the website from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, The National Education Association teacher’s union is a consistent Democratic donor. The NEA donated $21 million to Democrats in 2012, $22 million for the 2014 midterms, and $28 million for last year’s election. And that’s just one union.
Gee, it’s starting to look like the real sin DeVos is guilty of may be that she’s a Republican, while teacher’s unions are overwhelmingly Democrat (and of course, school vouchers tend to move students to private school, which in turn tend to not employ union members as much).
Yet again in our system, it might not be what DeVos has done (because as of right now, she has done nothing), it’s only what she might do (and whose employment that may affect).
But mostly ,it’s that she’s in the other tribe. On the other side. Just, you know, the “other”.
That’s the issue with DeVos, and with many of Trump’s nominees, and Trump himself when you get right down to it. We’ve become so tribal on so many things. Issues that might once have been non-partisan aren’t any more. School choice programs have received massive amounts of Democratic support in the past. Just ask Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who was allied with DeVos in the Alliance for School Choice, and has spent the bulk of his career promoting the idea, but who voted against her thanks to partisan politics.
The democratic resistance to a functioning democracy must be 100 percent, after all.
That’s how you stay elected in Washington these days.