We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial against Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos:
People who have seen her financial disclosures so far say that Ms. DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, have investments in some 250 companies registered to a single Grand Rapids, Mich., address, entities whose investments could take weeks for the ethics office to research. Already, though, there are reports that the DeVoses are indirect investors in Social Finance Inc., a private company that refinances student loans. Private lenders like Social Finance are banned from most of the direct student lending market; their lobbyists have already written to the Trump transition team pitching to change that. That’s only one potential conflict. What if her family has holdings in educational technology or for-profit colleges? Given time, the ethics office will learn this, and reach an agreement with Ms. DeVos to sell off assets that could pose a conflict.
Beyond erasing concerns about her many possible financial conflicts, Ms. DeVos also faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she’s done to public education in her home state, Michigan. She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.
And wow, this article by Noam Scheiber on DeVos and her use of her vast wealth:
“She is the most emblematic kind of oligarchic figure you can put in a cabinet position,” said Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites. “What she and the Kochs have in common is the unbridled use of wealth power to achieve whatever political goals they have.”
The DeVos hearing has been slightly delayed:
Senate Republicans have delayed the confirmation hearing for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education amid mounting criticism from Democrats that the GOP is rushing to install Trump’s Cabinet without sufficient vetting.
The Senate hearing for Betsy DeVos will now occur on the afternoon of January 17, the leaders of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee announced late Monday night. DeVos, a conservative education activist and wealthy philanthropist, was set to testify on Wednesday along with four other Trump nominees even though she had yet to sign a certified ethics agreement detailing how she planned to resolve potential conflicts of interest—a step that traditionally occurs before a nominee receives a confirmation hearing.
At The Guardian, former White House ethics lawyers Norman L. Eisen and Richard W. Painter explain why the confirmation hearings must be delayed:
As the former White House ethics counsels for Presidents Bush and Obama, we were involved in the submission of many presidential nominations to the US Senate for confirmation. We and others worked hard to make sure those nominees’ financial disclosure reports and ethics agreements were finalized and certified by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) before their hearings, so that the Senate and thus the public could explore any conflicts of interest and how they were addressed.
This week’s hearings for the president-elect’s cabinet are flouting that practice, and for that reason, should be postponed. [...]
Completion of the ethics review process prior to Senate confirmation hearings ensures that all parties have a detailed understanding of the nominee’s commitments prior to taking office, offers full transparency to the Senate, and mitigates the opportunity for undue influence on the independent ethics review process.
Some of President-elect Trump’s nominees have completed this process, but many have not.
Elana Schor at POLITICO:
Of the nine Donald Trump Cabinet picks who were to head to Capitol Hill for confirmation hearings this week, only six have reached agreements with the independent Office of Government Ethics to resolve potential ethical conflicts stemming from their personal finances, according to a POLITICO review of public records.
By contrast, all seven of Barack Obama’s Cabinet selections facing confirmation hearings at this point in the process in 2009 had already signed ethics agreements.
As for Senator Sessions, Michelle Ye Hee Lee factcheks the Trump camp claim that he has a “strong civil rights record” and finds little there:
Three other cases listed on the information from Sessions’s staff and his Senate questionnaire are cases that were filed before Sessions became United States attorney. Attorneys in these three cases dispute that Sessions played any substantive role. [...]
“U.S. attorneys did not participate in school desegregation cases,” said Rich, who worked on such cases for nearly two decades. “There were only a few occasions where the U.S. attorney even discussed cases with me, or was interested in what we were doing, and it was never Sessions. I never met Sessions.”
Andrew Rosenthal at The New York Times:
With the inauguration less than two weeks away, it’s certainly looking as if McConnell’s Republican Senate majority will do a complete about-face and rush through Trump’s appointments without the process on which senators used to insist.
McConnell and his cronies have crammed the Senate schedule full of confirmation hearings for Trump’s selections for major cabinet officials, including several of the biggest positions for this Wednesday. [...]
This year, he’s telling Democrats to “grow up.” “All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration at having not only lost the White House, but having lost the Senate,” he said on Sunday.
Ethics review is hardly a “little procedural complaint,” especially since the Trump camp reportedly did far less than previous presidential transition teams to vet candidates before nominating them. Of course, since Trump won’t clear up the endless conflicts of interest involving his business interests and those of his children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom he is appointing to a senior White House role, why should we expect him to be concerned about his appointees’ conflicts?
Yes, as Dana Milbank points out, McConnell’s hypocrisy is astonishing:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is a tough and wily operator. But he is opposed by an equally relentless and worthy adversary: Mitch McConnell.
Nobody in recent memory has argued so frequently and so passionately against himself as the Kentucky Republican. Oyez, oyez, oyez: Let us hear the case of McConnell v. McConnell.
Here’s Paul Waldman’s take at The Week:
Just as this president is the one whose tax returns we most desperately need to see, these Cabinet appointments are the ones whose backgrounds, beliefs, and conflicts of interests most require detailed examination. Many of them have never served in government before and/or have vast fortunes that could be affected by their decisions in office. They and other appointments seem to have been chosen because they're rich, or because Trump had seen them on TV, or, in one case, because the nominee had a cool nickname. Perhaps most importantly, they'll be serving a president who is a proud ignoramus about the operations of government, and therefore has virtually no idea what they ought to be doing and will probably have no idea what they're actually doing. That could give them unusual power in the Trump administration.
And on a final note, don’t miss Eugene Robinson’s takedown of Trump’s Twitter tantrums:
[W]e cannot ignore his vitriolic tweet storms. No, we should not let them distract us from other news about the incoming administration. But the Twitter rants offer a glimpse into Trump’s psyche, and it’s not pretty. [...]
I don’t believe Trump’s tweets are part of some sophisticated strategy to draw attention from other events and topics. To me, this looks like simple action and reaction. When someone criticizes him publicly in a way that threatens his stature, he seems compelled to hit back. He can’t seem to ignore any slight.
That’s a sign of weakness, not strength — as Putin and other world leaders surely have figured out.