Pence casts history-making vote to break DeVos tie
The Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary Tuesday — but only after a historic tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.
All 48 Democrats plus two Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted against the Michigan school-choice advocate.
Pence joined the remaining 50 Republicans to give DeVos (right) the 51 votes she needed.
It was the first time a vice president has cast a tie-breaking vote for a Cabinet nominee.
Pence arrived at the Capitol around 11:30 a.m.
Voting kicked off shortly after noon as the clerk ticked off the names of each of the senators.
At 12:28 p.m., the vote was tied 50 to 50. Pence walked in at 12:29 p.m. and took the head seat as Senate president.
He gaveled in and read from a sheet of paper handed to him by a Senate clerk.
“On this vote the yeas are 50, the nays are 50,” Pence said. “The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in
the affirmative and the nomination is confirmed.”
Pence’s vote made history, but another vice president had ad the same opportunity nearly a cen-century ago — but slept throughgh it.
In 1925, Vice President Charlesharles Dawes napped through a crucial vote to save President Calvin Coolidge’s choice for attorney general, eneral, Charles B. Warren. Dawes hadad left the Senate chamber to catch h some shut-eye.
HISTORY was made Tuesday when Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.
But the necessity of Pence’s vote reflected another kind of history, too: The decision by all Senate Democrats to reject DeVos marked a new low for the flailing party.
Democrats claim to stand for the poor, immigrants and nonwhites. Yet given a chance to actually support someone who is dedicated to improving education for all America’s children, especially those trapped in urban failing schools, the Dems’ said no, hell no.
Joined by two Republicans, they stood in the schoolhouse door to block vital change, casting their lot with teachers unions that fear reform the way a vampire fears garlic.
Throw away all the subtexts and subterfuge, a defense of the rotten status quo is the only explanation for the bid to block DeVos. The teachers unions pulled the strings, and the political puppets danced to their masters’ tune.
DeVos survived because President Trump is determined to deliver a government that shatters the insiders’ perks and privilege and opens the door to new ways of doing things. In education, that means giving more parents the power of school choice and taking power away from the union establishment.
Millions of children, most poor and many black and Latino, are forced to attend failure factories that rob them of America’s promise. While family breakdown is a prime culprit, the social contract requires society to do its best to compensate.
And there is no question that charter schools, vouchers and other experiments offer the best hope for bringing fresh ideas and progress to educational deserts.
DeVos, a passionate crusader for excellence in the classroom, is just one of the Trump nominees Democrats tried to block in their insane attempts to destroy his presidency before it gets started.
No president has ever had so few Cabinet members confirmed at this late date, just as no president has been confronted with such open talk of assassination and impeachment.
Speaking of which, have you heard a single Democrat decry the talk of assassination? Have you heard a single Democrat denounce the violence carried out by so-called protesters?
The answer is no and no because Dems see the riots and threats of violence as legitimate expressions of disapproval — and convenient for their purposes. Their contribution to the “resistance” started when 70 Democrats boycotted Trump’s inauguration and many senators boycotted confirmation hearings and votes. Maybe they’ll soon throw rocks through windows.
The madness was on full display Monday night when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer boasted in a tweet from outside the Capitol that “While the GOP is pushing a vote on Betsy DeVos, the people are rallying outside. We’re with them.”
Think of that: the Democrats’ leader walks out on his job to play the role of a man of the people in a staged demonstration. This is a party that has lost its mind, as well as its soul.
It is noteworthy that Schumer started the Trump era by talking about a willingness to work with the new president on infrastructure and other areas of common ground. It was too good to last.
For being relatively reasonable, Schumer was denounced by party radicals and anarchists as a collaborator and got noisy, vulgar demonstrations outside his Brooklyn home.
In a flash, he abandoned any talk of cooperation and jumped on the radical bandwagon, no doubt hoping to keep the minority-leader job he just got. Schumer probably also sees going along with the rabble as the only way to raise money for the beleaguered party’s candidates in the 2018 midterms.
In any case, the responsibility of leadership eludes him. Democrats created their own problems by blindly agreeing to all of Barack Obama’s ultra-liberal policies, and the fed-up response of Republican voters was to nominate Trump.
In their response, Hillary Clinton and her team poured acid on Trump and his followers, thinking they could make him so toxic that he would be disqualified. They were wrong.
Yet even now, they apparently have no idea why they failed because they are following the same script again. They continue to denounce Trump in the most hyperbolic terms, declare his nominees unfit and dangerous — and expect a different outcome.
They shouldn’t hold their breath. Trump has made rookie errors, but his resolve in picking DeVos and sticking with her proves he is deadly serious about fixing what’s broken in American education.
What, pray tell, are Democrats serious about?