The confirmation hearings for Betsy DeVos provided an inordinate amount of drama: guns and grizzlies, an all-night talkathon on the Senate floor, and Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote — and with good reason. DeVos, now confirmed as secretary of Education, is not just another inexperienced member of the president’s ... Read More »
Betsy DeVos, just sworn in as education secretary after Vice President Pence cast a tiebreaking vote in the Senate to confirm her appointment, visited Howard University on Thursday to meet with university leaders. It was her first visit as secretary. On Friday, she visited Jefferson Academy, a public school in ... Read More »
WASHINGTON — U.S. Vice President Mike Pence says he fully expects billionaire GOP donor Betsy DeVos will be confirmed as education secretary with his tie-breaking vote. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Pence says the Trump administration is “very confident” she will take up her Cabinet post soon. Last week, two ... Read More »
Today is D-Day in Washington — the confirmation debate and vote on Betsy DeVos, one of Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees and the most contested. Despite the assurance of President Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer the confirmation is a cinch, the administration is making a last-ditch push today for DeVos in ... Read More »
In a powerful and passionate speech, a Detroit student expressed why she doesn’t think Betsy DeVos should be Secretary of Education. In a video the American Federation of Teachers posted on Facebook, Dannah Wilson (whose name was spelled incorrectly in the video and later corrected in the comments) explained that 119 parents, ... Read More »
Democratic senators tried their best to rattle Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing to be Education Secretary on Tuesday, but she glided serenely through the process. “Nothing in life is truly free,” she sweetly said to Bernie Sanders (I-VT) when the former Democratic presidential candidate brought up his proposal to ... Read More »
WASHINGTON, D.C.—It was not a hearing. It was the mere burlesque of a hearing, rendered meaningless by a preposterously accelerated process that rendered all questioning perfunctory and that left all cheap evasions hanging in the air of the committee room the way cigarette smoke used to canopy the proceedings back ... Read More »
Senate Democrats hit Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, on all sides at her confirmation hearing Tuesday night. But the question that made her look worst required her to demonstrate a basic understanding of education policy — a test DeVos failed. Sen. Al Franken asked DeVos to explain ... Read More »
After Tom Casperson, a Republican state senator from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, began running for Congress in 2016, he assumed the family of Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to be education secretary, would not oppose him. The DeVoses, a dominant force in Michigan politics for decades with a fortune ... Read More »
The confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, the billionaire philanthropist who is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of education, has been delayed for almost a week. DeVos’ hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, but late on Monday night, the Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions announced it had been ... Read More »
