Last night, Democrats threw an all-night temper tantrum on the Senate floor.
Why?
Well, it probably had something to do with the 33 million dollars teachers unions donated to mostly Democratic candidates in 2016.
See, teacher’s unions are adamantly opposed to any meaningful reform to our education system. Specifically, programs that empower parents to choose schools and educational opportunies that best suit their child’s unique needs. Such a system would both implicitly and explicitly hold teachers and school districts accountable, and unions hate that. Never mind that these programs tend to benefit urban minorities, most of whom happen to be Democrats. Those people aren’t paying.
Anyway, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, favors these sorts of approaches, and has played a key role in implementing them across the country. This terrifies Democrats, and so they stayed up all night screeching about it:
The chamber went to brief, intermittent quorum calls as senator after senator completed his or her remarks and yielded the floor to a colleague. And a lone Republican senator, South Carolina’s Tim Scott, went to the floor to speak, as well, arguing that lawmakers’ focus should be not on DeVos, but on ways to improve the education system.
Emotions ran high ahead of the vote as constituents jammed senators’ phone lines with calls and protesters gathered outside the Capitol, including one person in a grizzly bear costume to ridicule DeVos’ comment during her confirmation hearing that some schools might want guns to protect against grizzlies.
“Mrs. DeVos demonstrated a complete lack of experience in, knowledge of and support for public education. She was unable to address basic issues that any New Hampshire school board member could discuss fluently,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., whose son has cerebral palsy but studied in public schools under a federal law that guarantees access for disabled students. Several Democrats questioned DeVos’ commitment to and understanding of that law.
But Republicans accused Democrats of slow-walking DeVos and other qualified nominees to placate liberal base voters who still haven’t come to terms with Trump’s election.
The vote to confirm DeVos is expected to split down party lines, with two Republicans wholly owned by the teacher’s unions, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voting with the party they really belong in. Vice President Mike Pence will cast the tiebreaking vote in favor of DeVos, and then liberals will have to find something else to cry about.
