Trump’s Pick for Education Could Face Unusually Stiff Resistance
DeVos hearing delayed: Call the HELP committee members today - Network For Public Education #DumpDeVos
Nominees for secretary of education have typically breezed through confirmation by the Senate with bipartisan approval.
But Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for the post, is no typical nominee. She is a billionaire with a complex web of financial investments, including in companies that stand to win or lose from the department she would oversee. She has been an aggressive force in politics for years, as a prominent Republican donor and as a supporter of steering public dollars to private schools.
Her wealth and her politics seem likely to make her confirmation hearing unusually contentious, and possibly drawn out.
The hearing, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday of this week, was postponed until Tuesday after Democrats complained she had not completed an agreement with the independent Office of Government Ethics that outlined a plan to deal with potential conflicts of interest. The ethics office has said it has not completed its review of Ms. DeVos, which is required before the office can make any agreement. A spokesman for Ms. DeVos said she had responded to a first round of questions from the office last weekend.
On Thursday, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee that will hold the hearing, said she and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the panel’s Republican chairman, “have some concerns about missing information” on the financial disclosure forms that Ms. DeVos has filed with the Senate. Ms. Murray would not specify what they were looking for, because those disclosures are not public, but said they had asked Ms. DeVos for additional information. Ms. Murray said she had “pushed very hard” not to hold the hearing until Ms. DeVos had completed her agreement with the ethics office.
“This is a candidate with extremely complicated financial dealings,” the senator said. “We have to know, if there are conflicts of interests, how those are going to be resolved. If we don’t have that, it’s incumbent on all of us to say we cannot vote for that.”
Some Republican committee leaders, including Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who is chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, have said they will hew to a tradition of not holding hearings until the ethics office signs off on the nominee.
But a spokeswoman for Mr. Alexander said his panel — the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — had “no rules” about a need for an ethics review, and that the chairman intended to hold the hearing on Tuesday regardless.
Mr. Alexander also said he would limit senators on the panel — 12 Republicans and 11 Democrats — to five minutes of questions each, after opening statements by him and Ms. Murray.
His office noted that Rod Paige, President George W. Bush’s first education secretary, had a hearing eight days before his ethics review was complete. But Mr. Paige, a school superintendent when he was nominated, did not have nearly the same wealth or financial investments as Ms. DeVos.
Mr. Alexander’s office said the committee would not hold a vote on Ms. DeVos’s nomination until her ethics review was complete.Trump’s Pick for Education Could Face Unusually Stiff Resistance - The New York Times: