President Trump isn’t the only one who will be in the Dems’ crosshairs come January. In a target-rich environment for the new House majority, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos likely strikes many liberals as the easiest of pickings.
After a shaky hearing, DeVos had to rely on a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence to be confirmed in the Senate. GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted against her, and it has all been downhill from there as far as her public image is concerned.
In her liberal caricature, DeVos appears as a wealthy dilettante who knows little about education. And her department, in this view, has become a haven for incompetence and insensitivity.
That’s why incoming chairs at the Education and Financial Services committees, as well as the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education (Reps. Mark Takano, Maxine Waters and Rosa DeLauro, respectively), are already preparing to put DeVos on the hot seat. They want to interrogate her stances on the regulation of for-profit colleges and student-loan debt, among other things.
An even more ominous sign is that both Trump and congressional Republicans have largely ignored her priorities over the past two years. The sense in Washington is that if Democrats corner DeVos, neither the White House nor the GOP will do much to back her.
With the president himself under siege, GOP thinking goes, there may not be enough political ammunition left to protect DeVos.
But Republicans would be making a grave mistake if they decide that DeVos is dispensable. For starters, it’s a tactical error for the GOP to let Dems think they can chase any member of the administration out of office without a fight.
More important, DeVos’ record is not the disaster her critics describe, and Republicans who say they care about outreach to minority voters should realize she’s one of the few people in the administration who has a clue about how to do it.
The truth is that liberal hostility to DeVos has more to do with her opinions than it does with her competence.
Her main “sin” is that she has staked out positions that are anathema to the teachers’ unions and their Dem clients.
If the left has singled out her rollback of Obama-era regulations on for-profit schools, it’s not because she’s guilty of corruption but because she doesn’t share the Dem antipathy to private industry. Her critiques of student-loan regulations are also sound. Congress needs to address the problem with legislation instead of leaving it up to federal bureaucrats.
DeVos likewise deserves praise for her efforts to inject more protections for the accused into sexual-assault cases on college campuses. The left, however, has flayed her for arguing that students don’t relinquish their constitutional rights when they enter the quad.
Similarly, her department’s reversal of an Obama decision to ignore complaints about anti-Semitism on college campuses should be cheered instead of causing Democrats to accuse her of opposing free speech.
Then there is DeVos’ support for school choice. The left points to it as Exhibit A in her preference for ideology over pragmatism. But her ideas can help fix inner-city failure factories that consistently fail the mostly minority children trapped in them.
Instead of dismissing her reformist approach, Republicans — and Democrats who care more about helping kids than paying debts to unions — should have been listening to her.
GOP figures who fret about their inability to connect with African-American voters should embrace her reforms — ones that primarily benefit poor and minority children. That’s one way for the right to show that it isn’t exclusively focused only on the concerns of rural and working-class whites.
Rather than permit the Dems to carve up DeVos, Trump and the GOP should champion her and her projects. If they let her go down without defending her, it won’t be just an injustice to a good public servant but a missed opportunity for their party.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review.