White House wants credit for Papadopoulos arrest
Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that Mueller’s probe brought down Papadopoulos only because of White House cooperation.
By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM and LOUIS NELSON
The White House on Tuesday sought to take credit for the arrest of a former Trump campaign aide who had repeated contacts with Russia-linked officials offering “dirt” on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — marking the latest damage control move as the Russia probe intensifies.
President Donald Trump and other White House allies had so far sought to downplay the role of George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy adviser, whose plea deal was made public by special counsel Robert Mueller on Monday, the same day that two top Trump campaign officials were indicted on charges unrelated to the campaign.
Trump derided Papadopoulos on Tuesday morning as a “liar,” while former campaign aide Michael Caputo dismissed him as “the coffee boy.”
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went further Tuesday afternoon, claiming the White House and the campaign deserved credit for helping Mueller’s team build its case that Papadopoulos had lied to the FBI about his contacts.
“Papadopoulos is an example of actually somebody doing the wrong thing while the president's campaign did the right thing,” Sanders said. “All of his emails were voluntarily provided to the special counsel by the campaign, and that is what led to the process and the place that we’re in right now is the campaign fully cooperating and helping with that. What Papadopoulos did was lie, and that’s on him and not on the campaign, and we can’t speak to that.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about when the documents in question had been turned over. Papadopoulos was initially interviewed as part of the FBI’s probe into Russian election meddling on Jan. 27. He was arrested in July.
The Washington Post reported that Trump’s campaign handed over emails implicating Papadopoulos to the special counsel in August — after he had already been arrested.
Court documents indicate that Papadopoulos has been a cooperative witness as part of the special counsel’s probe.
Sanders on Tuesday also defended other campaign officials who interacted with Papadopoulos, including by claiming that one official — who has been identified in news reports as campaign aide Sam Clovis — did not encourage Papadopoulos to travel to Russia.
“My understanding is there wasn’t encouragement,” Sanders said.
But according to the plea deal, the official who has been identified as Clovis wrote, “I would encourage you … [to] make the trip … if it is feasible.”
The obfuscation was part of a broader push on Tuesday against new questions raised by Mueller’s revelation on Monday of charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, another campaign aide, including money laundering and other crimes related to the pair’s relationship with pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.
Trump on Tuesday morning cast the Manafort charges as a vindication, of sorts, for the campaign. He also belittled Papadopoulos, despite having called him “an excellent guy” to The Washington Post editorial board in March 2016.
“The Fake News is working overtime. As Paul Manaforts [sic] lawyer said, there was 'no collusion' and events mentioned took place long before he came to the campaign,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!”
Trump continued trying to redirect the heat toward Democrats.
"The biggest story yesterday, the one that has the Dems in a dither, is Podesta running from his firm. What he know [sic] about Crooked Dems is earth shattering," Trump wrote on Twitter later Tuesday, alluding to the departure of Tony Podesta, the brother of former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, from his eponymously named lobbying firm. "He and his brother could Drain The Swamp, which would be yet another campaign promise fulfilled. Fake News weak!"
Shortly after Trump tweeted, John Podesta, whose emails were taken by suspected Kremlin-backed hackers and released by WikiLeaks, responded online to the president.
"Not bad enough that I was the victim of a massive cyber crime directed by the Russian President, now I’m the victim of a big lie campaign by the American President," Podesta tweeted Tuesday.
Former Trump campaign officials and other allies also worked the morning TV news shows to downplay Papadopoulos' role on the campaign and draw a line between the crimes allegedly committed by Manafort and Gates and their work on the campaign.
Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide, told CNN's "New Day" that he was unaware of Manafort's alleged crimes and did not know Papadopoulos at all.
"The leaders of the Washington office of the campaign didn’t even know who he was until his name appeared in the press,” Caputo said. "I mean, you might’ve called him a foreign policy analyst, but, in fact, you know, if he was going to wear a wire, all we’d know now is whether he prefers a caramel macchiato over a regular American coffee in conversations with his barista. He had nothing to do with the campaign."
In an appearance on NBC's "Today" show, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said he did not know whether he was the "high-ranking campaign official" whom Papadopoulos said he emailed regarding his interactions with Russia-linked contacts.
Lewandowski told NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie that in his role as campaign manager, he received thousands of emails per day and could not recall whether he had been included on the emails Papadopoulos sent.
Still, Lewandowski dismissed Papadopoulos as a "low-level volunteer" who was "never a person who was interacting with the senior management on a regular basis."
And Trump's personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, noted Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Papadopoulos never traveled for the meeting with his Russia-connected contacts that he had emailed others in the campaign about. He said that nothing about Manafort's or Gates' charges was related to the Trump 2016 campaign and that Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, not to anything involving his interactions with individuals tied to Russia.
"Remember this: Collusion, in and of itself — there's no crime of collusion," Sekulow told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos. "What is a violation of law here, I go back to that, for George Papadopoulos, the violation of the law, George, was that he lied to FBI agents, which is clearly not condoned by the administration."
Democrats were not eager to let Trump and his aides off the hook, especially when it comes to the central question of whether the campaign colluded with Russian officials trying to tip the election Trump’s way.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, hit back at Trump’s Tuesday morning tweet that there was “no collusion.”
“With respect, Mr. President, not sure we can rely on Mr. Manafort’s lawyer to tell us whether there was collusion, as unbiased as he may be,” Schiff tweeted.
November 01, 2017
Mueller schedules interview
Mueller schedules interview with Hope Hicks
The White House communications director is due to speak with prosecutors in the Russia probe after Trump returns from his Asia trip.
By ANNIE KARNI and JOSH DAWSEY
President Donald Trump’s longtime aide and current communications director, Hope Hicks, is scheduled to speak with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in mid-November, following the president’s trip to Asia, multiple people familiar with the schedule told POLITICO.
Mueller’s team is also expected to interview three or four other current White House officials as early as this week, according to an administration official.
Mueller’s team already has interviewed former aides, including Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and former press secretary Sean Spicer. But the latest round of interviews appears to mark a new phase of the investigation — hauling in current administration officials for daylong depositions.
“Nothing about recent events alters the White House’s commitment to fully cooperate with the office of the special counsel,” White House lawyer Ty Cobb said Tuesday in an interview.
The White House expects Mueller to wrap up his interviews by Thanksgiving.
Hicks, 28, one of only a few aides who has been at Trump’s side and in the room since before he launched his presidential campaign, has long been expected to be called as a witness. Earlier this fall, she retained a personal attorney, Robert Trout.
But her scheduled interview comes just as allies of the president, including former chief strategist Steve Bannon, have been pressuring Trump and his lawyers to find ways to undercut Mueller’s investigation — especially after the White House was blindsided by criminal charges filed against three former Trump campaign aides on Monday.
Breitbart news chief Bannon, according to two people familiar with his thinking, has been pushing the idea of defunding Mueller’s investigation. That strategy is easier said than done: Mueller’s budget is drawn from a permanent Treasury Department account, and the Justice Department regulations that were used in Mueller’s appointment note that he “shall be provided all appropriate resources” to conduct his investigation.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the president would not support defunding the probe.
But Bannon has been double-teaming the White House along with billionaire real estate investor and longtime Trump confidant Tom Barrack on the idea of shaking up its legal team in favor of attorneys who will take a more combative, less conciliatory, approach toward Mueller and his team. That view was shared by former Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz.
Cobb, in contrast, has stressed his relationship with Mueller that has spanned decades as an asset to the president, and underscored repeatedly to Trump that more cooperation will help end the investigation sooner. For now, Cobb’s word appears to be carrying the day with Trump: The president is listening to him, White House officials said, and so far has done nothing to block his go-along-to-get-along strategy.
That’s in part because for now, people close to the White House said the president and his team understand they don’t have much choice.
With three fresh indictments on the table, it would be “political suicide” at this juncture, one insider familiar with the White House’s thinking said, to stop cooperating with the special counsel’s office. The continued cooperation, instead, is a signal the White House is confident the president is in no real jeopardy as the investigation continues.
On Tuesday, Sanders said the president still supports his current legal team. “I’m not sure how he couldn’t, considering ... all of the revelations that have taken place ... have nothing to do with the president, have nothing to do with his campaign,” she said.
The White House communications director is due to speak with prosecutors in the Russia probe after Trump returns from his Asia trip.
By ANNIE KARNI and JOSH DAWSEY
President Donald Trump’s longtime aide and current communications director, Hope Hicks, is scheduled to speak with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in mid-November, following the president’s trip to Asia, multiple people familiar with the schedule told POLITICO.
Mueller’s team is also expected to interview three or four other current White House officials as early as this week, according to an administration official.
Mueller’s team already has interviewed former aides, including Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and former press secretary Sean Spicer. But the latest round of interviews appears to mark a new phase of the investigation — hauling in current administration officials for daylong depositions.
“Nothing about recent events alters the White House’s commitment to fully cooperate with the office of the special counsel,” White House lawyer Ty Cobb said Tuesday in an interview.
The White House expects Mueller to wrap up his interviews by Thanksgiving.
Hicks, 28, one of only a few aides who has been at Trump’s side and in the room since before he launched his presidential campaign, has long been expected to be called as a witness. Earlier this fall, she retained a personal attorney, Robert Trout.
But her scheduled interview comes just as allies of the president, including former chief strategist Steve Bannon, have been pressuring Trump and his lawyers to find ways to undercut Mueller’s investigation — especially after the White House was blindsided by criminal charges filed against three former Trump campaign aides on Monday.
Breitbart news chief Bannon, according to two people familiar with his thinking, has been pushing the idea of defunding Mueller’s investigation. That strategy is easier said than done: Mueller’s budget is drawn from a permanent Treasury Department account, and the Justice Department regulations that were used in Mueller’s appointment note that he “shall be provided all appropriate resources” to conduct his investigation.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the president would not support defunding the probe.
But Bannon has been double-teaming the White House along with billionaire real estate investor and longtime Trump confidant Tom Barrack on the idea of shaking up its legal team in favor of attorneys who will take a more combative, less conciliatory, approach toward Mueller and his team. That view was shared by former Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz.
Cobb, in contrast, has stressed his relationship with Mueller that has spanned decades as an asset to the president, and underscored repeatedly to Trump that more cooperation will help end the investigation sooner. For now, Cobb’s word appears to be carrying the day with Trump: The president is listening to him, White House officials said, and so far has done nothing to block his go-along-to-get-along strategy.
That’s in part because for now, people close to the White House said the president and his team understand they don’t have much choice.
With three fresh indictments on the table, it would be “political suicide” at this juncture, one insider familiar with the White House’s thinking said, to stop cooperating with the special counsel’s office. The continued cooperation, instead, is a signal the White House is confident the president is in no real jeopardy as the investigation continues.
On Tuesday, Sanders said the president still supports his current legal team. “I’m not sure how he couldn’t, considering ... all of the revelations that have taken place ... have nothing to do with the president, have nothing to do with his campaign,” she said.
Arbitration rule
Trump to sign legislation overturning arbitration rule
The rule bans forced arbitration clauses in contracts.
By LORRAINE WOELLERT
President Donald Trump will sign legislation overturning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mandatory arbitration rule Wednesday afternoon, according to a White House official.
The president’s decision comes despite a personal appeal from CFPB Director Richard Cordray and veterans groups, who opposed a congressional vote to overturn the consumer watchdog's rule using the Congressional Review Act.
The rule bans forced-arbitration clauses in contracts, making it easier for bank and credit card customers to sue to settle disputes.
A banking industry representative applauded the news.
“The CFPB’s rule was never about protecting consumers; rather, it was about protecting trial lawyers and their wallets,” said Richard Hunt, chief executive officer of the Consumer Bankers Association. “The bureau’s own study backs that up and proves trial lawyers would have been the real winners.”
The rule bans forced arbitration clauses in contracts.
By LORRAINE WOELLERT
President Donald Trump will sign legislation overturning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mandatory arbitration rule Wednesday afternoon, according to a White House official.
The president’s decision comes despite a personal appeal from CFPB Director Richard Cordray and veterans groups, who opposed a congressional vote to overturn the consumer watchdog's rule using the Congressional Review Act.
The rule bans forced-arbitration clauses in contracts, making it easier for bank and credit card customers to sue to settle disputes.
A banking industry representative applauded the news.
“The CFPB’s rule was never about protecting consumers; rather, it was about protecting trial lawyers and their wallets,” said Richard Hunt, chief executive officer of the Consumer Bankers Association. “The bureau’s own study backs that up and proves trial lawyers would have been the real winners.”
Obama goes to bat
Obama goes to bat for health law on first day of sign-ups
By RACHANA PRADHAN
Former President Barack Obama sought to boost his namesake health law Wednesday by appearing in a video urging people to sign up for coverage on the first day of the 2018 enrollment season.
Obama’s call comes as the Trump administration has taken numerous actions to undermine the law while doing almost nothing to publicize the start of the six-week enrollment season that wraps up on Dec. 15.
“HealthCare.gov is open for business right now,” the former president said in the video released by Get America Covered, an advocacy organization run by former Obama health officials. “You can shop for a health insurance plan that's right for you and your family. It only takes a few minutes, and the vast majority of people qualify for financial assistance.”
Obama has made few public statements about the Affordable Care Act since leaving office, even as Republicans have repeatedly tried to undo his signature domestic achievement.
Confusion has clouded the 2018 enrollment season as President Donald Trump and many Republicans continue to insist they will dismantle the law despite the collapse of their earlier efforts. Other actions from the White House and HHS — including chopping the budget for Obamacare ads by 90 percent and cutting grants to enrollment groups by 40 percent — are expected to result in enrollment declines next year.
Noise surrounding the GOP’s repeal attempts have also sowed vast confusion about the law’s status, recent polls show.
By RACHANA PRADHAN
Former President Barack Obama sought to boost his namesake health law Wednesday by appearing in a video urging people to sign up for coverage on the first day of the 2018 enrollment season.
Obama’s call comes as the Trump administration has taken numerous actions to undermine the law while doing almost nothing to publicize the start of the six-week enrollment season that wraps up on Dec. 15.
“HealthCare.gov is open for business right now,” the former president said in the video released by Get America Covered, an advocacy organization run by former Obama health officials. “You can shop for a health insurance plan that's right for you and your family. It only takes a few minutes, and the vast majority of people qualify for financial assistance.”
Obama has made few public statements about the Affordable Care Act since leaving office, even as Republicans have repeatedly tried to undo his signature domestic achievement.
Confusion has clouded the 2018 enrollment season as President Donald Trump and many Republicans continue to insist they will dismantle the law despite the collapse of their earlier efforts. Other actions from the White House and HHS — including chopping the budget for Obamacare ads by 90 percent and cutting grants to enrollment groups by 40 percent — are expected to result in enrollment declines next year.
Noise surrounding the GOP’s repeal attempts have also sowed vast confusion about the law’s status, recent polls show.
Government shutdown
Dems weigh government shutdown over Dreamers fight
Senate Democrats are debating whether to embrace brinkmanship in order to win relief for undocumented immigrants.
By SEUNG MIN KIM
Senate Democrats are weighing whether to use their ultimate leverage — the threat of a government shutdown in December — in their bid to protect hundreds of thousands of so-called Dreamers from possible deportation.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a prospective 2020 presidential hopeful, raised the specter of a year-end showdown last week when she declared she wouldn’t vote for a spending bill that doesn’t help children of undocumented immigrants who came to the country as minors. Republicans will need Democratic votes — definitely in the Senate and almost certainly in the House, too — to pass legislation to keep the government funded.
Other Democrats told Politico they agreed with Harris.
“It’d be very difficult for me to support the end-of-the-year bill, whatever that may be, if DACA has not been taken care of,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.). “If we can’t take care of the Dreamers, I think it jeopardizes America’s standing on our principle strength: our values.”
But a number of other Democratic senators said they aren’t willing to go there — at least not yet.
“It is a topic which we are not raising at this point, because we hope we don’t even need to think about it,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a party leader on immigration. “But I tell you, everyone I’ve spoken to — starting with me — are very serious this has to be done this year.”
With influential GOP senators trying to craft an immigration plan that can get buy-in from both parties, many Senate Democrats want to leave space for the talks to unfold without resorting to hard-line tactics. But less than six weeks remain until government funding runs out Dec. 8, and it’s unclear how lawmakers will bridge the immigration rift by the end of the year, as top Democrats have promised.
Meanwhile, liberal Democrats in the House are vowing more vocally to withhold their votes for a must-pass spending package if lawmakers don’t come up with a congressional backstop for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Donald Trump plans to phase out starting in March.
For now, most Senate Democrats are signaling caution, concerned that an uncompromising public stance could upend prospects of a bipartisan deal and reluctant to be seen as using Dreamers as bargaining chips.
Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are trying to round up support for their legislation that would let nearly 700,000 current DACA recipients and other young undocumented immigrants obtain legal status. Graham has been working on a parallel track with other Republicans to find border security and other restrictive immigration measures that lawmakers could then pair with legislation that would shield Dreamers.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) declined to say whether she would vote against a spending measure without a DACA fix, stressing: “I feel very strongly we need to get it done and we need to get it done now.”
“If we do nothing between now and the end of the year and try and jam it into the spending bill, it makes it less likely that it will be a bipartisan, lasting solution to the challenge of the Dreamers,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). “But you should hear clearly the determination of many of us to get this fixed.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, made similar comments: “There are a number of Republicans who’ve been out there, this is something we need to fix. I think we need to give that a chance to work and we should all try and act in good faith on that.”
Other contentious provisions are also in play during the year-end fight over annual funding levels and policy prescriptions. After backing off his insistence to secure funding for a border wall in September, Trump could again push to fund it — a nonstarter among Democrats and even some Republicans.
Congress could also use the spending package to continue payments to insurers for key Obamacare subsidies that Trump is scrapping, adding a contentious health care debate to the scramble on Capitol Hill. And lawmakers have yet to resolve the most basic element of a funding package: what the spending levels for federal agencies should be.
Democratic leaders promised earlier this year to try to attach a DACA fix to other bills, such as legislation reauthorizing a children’s health care program. But that program hasn’t been extended and few must-pass measures have actually been sent to the White House since Trump’s DACA announcement.
Some immigration advocates are urging lawmakers to include the Dream Act in a spending package, betting that GOP leaders can’t move a stand-alone measure because immigration is such a divisive issue for the party.
“We’re confident that, if Congress doesn’t address this crisis before December, which would be preferable, Democrats will make it clear that the Dream Act has to be included,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the advocacy group America’s Voice.
But congressional Republicans are focused on tax reform rather than immigration. And senior GOP lawmakers say they want to keep immigration separate from the year-end spending talks.
“I don’t believe it will, nor should it,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on whether a DACA fix will be included in a December spending deal. “If you start cramming a bunch of other stuff into it, it’s gonna be harder to get the votes to pass it.”
Senate Democrats may well decide to embrace brinkmanship closer to December, particularly if progress lags on a DACA deal in Congress. But for now, most are keeping their powder dry.
“DACA is a really urgent priority for me,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “I can’t say whether I would vote against a spending bill at this point, but I will do almost anything possible to assure that we approve of a DACA bill.”
Senate Democrats are debating whether to embrace brinkmanship in order to win relief for undocumented immigrants.
By SEUNG MIN KIM
Senate Democrats are weighing whether to use their ultimate leverage — the threat of a government shutdown in December — in their bid to protect hundreds of thousands of so-called Dreamers from possible deportation.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a prospective 2020 presidential hopeful, raised the specter of a year-end showdown last week when she declared she wouldn’t vote for a spending bill that doesn’t help children of undocumented immigrants who came to the country as minors. Republicans will need Democratic votes — definitely in the Senate and almost certainly in the House, too — to pass legislation to keep the government funded.
Other Democrats told Politico they agreed with Harris.
“It’d be very difficult for me to support the end-of-the-year bill, whatever that may be, if DACA has not been taken care of,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.). “If we can’t take care of the Dreamers, I think it jeopardizes America’s standing on our principle strength: our values.”
But a number of other Democratic senators said they aren’t willing to go there — at least not yet.
“It is a topic which we are not raising at this point, because we hope we don’t even need to think about it,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a party leader on immigration. “But I tell you, everyone I’ve spoken to — starting with me — are very serious this has to be done this year.”
With influential GOP senators trying to craft an immigration plan that can get buy-in from both parties, many Senate Democrats want to leave space for the talks to unfold without resorting to hard-line tactics. But less than six weeks remain until government funding runs out Dec. 8, and it’s unclear how lawmakers will bridge the immigration rift by the end of the year, as top Democrats have promised.
Meanwhile, liberal Democrats in the House are vowing more vocally to withhold their votes for a must-pass spending package if lawmakers don’t come up with a congressional backstop for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Donald Trump plans to phase out starting in March.
For now, most Senate Democrats are signaling caution, concerned that an uncompromising public stance could upend prospects of a bipartisan deal and reluctant to be seen as using Dreamers as bargaining chips.
Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are trying to round up support for their legislation that would let nearly 700,000 current DACA recipients and other young undocumented immigrants obtain legal status. Graham has been working on a parallel track with other Republicans to find border security and other restrictive immigration measures that lawmakers could then pair with legislation that would shield Dreamers.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) declined to say whether she would vote against a spending measure without a DACA fix, stressing: “I feel very strongly we need to get it done and we need to get it done now.”
“If we do nothing between now and the end of the year and try and jam it into the spending bill, it makes it less likely that it will be a bipartisan, lasting solution to the challenge of the Dreamers,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). “But you should hear clearly the determination of many of us to get this fixed.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, made similar comments: “There are a number of Republicans who’ve been out there, this is something we need to fix. I think we need to give that a chance to work and we should all try and act in good faith on that.”
Other contentious provisions are also in play during the year-end fight over annual funding levels and policy prescriptions. After backing off his insistence to secure funding for a border wall in September, Trump could again push to fund it — a nonstarter among Democrats and even some Republicans.
Congress could also use the spending package to continue payments to insurers for key Obamacare subsidies that Trump is scrapping, adding a contentious health care debate to the scramble on Capitol Hill. And lawmakers have yet to resolve the most basic element of a funding package: what the spending levels for federal agencies should be.
Democratic leaders promised earlier this year to try to attach a DACA fix to other bills, such as legislation reauthorizing a children’s health care program. But that program hasn’t been extended and few must-pass measures have actually been sent to the White House since Trump’s DACA announcement.
Some immigration advocates are urging lawmakers to include the Dream Act in a spending package, betting that GOP leaders can’t move a stand-alone measure because immigration is such a divisive issue for the party.
“We’re confident that, if Congress doesn’t address this crisis before December, which would be preferable, Democrats will make it clear that the Dream Act has to be included,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the advocacy group America’s Voice.
But congressional Republicans are focused on tax reform rather than immigration. And senior GOP lawmakers say they want to keep immigration separate from the year-end spending talks.
“I don’t believe it will, nor should it,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on whether a DACA fix will be included in a December spending deal. “If you start cramming a bunch of other stuff into it, it’s gonna be harder to get the votes to pass it.”
Senate Democrats may well decide to embrace brinkmanship closer to December, particularly if progress lags on a DACA deal in Congress. But for now, most are keeping their powder dry.
“DACA is a really urgent priority for me,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “I can’t say whether I would vote against a spending bill at this point, but I will do almost anything possible to assure that we approve of a DACA bill.”
Ethics Problem
The Supreme Court Has An Ethics Problem
Justices on the high court don’t have to follow the same code of conduct as they do in lower courts. That needs to change.
By ELIZABETH WARREN
A few days before the Supreme Court returned from its summer break, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court’s newest member, attended a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel, where he was to give the keynote address. The location of the speech attracted the attention of dozens of protesters and a number of ethics watchdogs, who noted the apparent conflict of interest posed by Justice Gorsuch—a Trump nominee—keynoting an event at a hotel whose revenue goes in part to President Trump. That arrangement was bad enough on its own. But there was another potential conflict of interest created by Justice Gorsuch’s speaking engagement—and it highlights the ongoing ethical issues that threaten the credibility of our nation’s highest court.
The same morning that Justice Gorsuch gave his speech, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Janus v. AFSCME. This is a case that will determine whether public sector unions—which represent teachers, nurses, firefighters and police in states and cities across the country—can collect fees from all employees in the workplaces they represent. Justice Gorsuch is widely expected to deliver the court’s deciding vote to strip unions of this ability. A decision along these lines would seriously undercut workers’ freedom to have a real voice to speak out and fight for higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions.
Here’s the rub. Justice Gorsuch’s speech at the Trump hotel was hosted by the Fund for American Studies. And who funds the Fund of American Studies? The Charles Koch Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. The Charles Koch Foundation is dedicated to promoting limited government, free markets and weaker unions; and the Bradley Foundation has worked for decades to, in their own words, “reduce the size and power of public sector unions.” In fact, the Bradley Foundation helped pay the litigation expenses for Janus—the case in which Justice Gorsuch is likely to be the deciding vote. Think about that: Just as the ink was drying on the court’s announcement that it would hear Janus, Justice Gorsuch was off to hobnob with some of the biggest supporters for one side of this important case—the side that wants to deny workers the freedom to build a future that doesn’t hang by a thread at the whim of a few billionaires.
This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has strayed over the ethical line. Take a look, for example, at ABC v. Aereo. The court concluded that Aereo, a small television streaming service, had violated the copyright of broadcasters by capturing signals from television stations and retransmitting programming from those stations to the company’s subscribers. Time Warner—one of the broadcasters who stood to lose if the court allowed the practice—filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the court should side with the broadcaster. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts owned as much as $500,000 in Time Warner stock. Despite this blatant conflict of interest, Roberts would not recuse himself from the case. Instead, he joined the majority in effectively killing the small streaming service.
There are plenty of other examples of ethical conflicts. According to Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group focused on increasing accountability and transparency on the Supreme Court, Justices Roberts, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito owned shares in 53 publicly traded companies as of 2016.
The Code of Conduct for United States Judges requires judges to recuse themselves when certain potential conflicts arise, such as in cases in which the judge, the judge’s spouse or the judge’s minor children have a financial interest or in cases in which the judge has a “personal bias or prejudice” against or for any party in the case. But those rules don’t apply to Supreme Court justices.
In fact, Supreme Court justices are the only federal judges who are not bound by a formal code of conduct. The reason, as explained by Chief Justice Roberts, is that the Supreme Court is the only court created under Article III of the Constitution, while the lower courts are created by Congress. For Chief Justice Roberts, it’s sufficient that the justices consult the code when determining their ethical duties and voluntarily abide by rules on a case-by-case basis.
The chief justice’s argument is exactly backward. When an ethical cloud hangs over the court, its fundamental integrity is compromised. At a time when Gallup polls have found that fewer than half of Americans approve of the way the court is handling its job, the justices ought to be making every effort to show that their personal integrity is above reproach.
It is time to begin rebuilding American’s confidence in the court by establishing a formal code of conduct. That’s why I co-sponsored Sen. Chris Murphy’s Supreme Court Ethics Act, a bill that requires the Supreme Court to adopt an ethical code. As the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court has an even greater duty to set the example for courts around the country and demonstrate that its decisions are based on a fair and unbiased assessment of the facts and the law, not personal biases or their own financial interests. Eliminating ethical questions and conflicts of interests should be the starting point.
Federal judges are not supposed to be politicians or advocates. They are supposed to rise above the political winds of the day and demonstrate a single-minded commitment to one promise: equal justice under law. As judges of the nation’s highest court, it is time for Supreme Court justices to demonstrate that they can meet that standard.
Justices on the high court don’t have to follow the same code of conduct as they do in lower courts. That needs to change.
By ELIZABETH WARREN
A few days before the Supreme Court returned from its summer break, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court’s newest member, attended a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel, where he was to give the keynote address. The location of the speech attracted the attention of dozens of protesters and a number of ethics watchdogs, who noted the apparent conflict of interest posed by Justice Gorsuch—a Trump nominee—keynoting an event at a hotel whose revenue goes in part to President Trump. That arrangement was bad enough on its own. But there was another potential conflict of interest created by Justice Gorsuch’s speaking engagement—and it highlights the ongoing ethical issues that threaten the credibility of our nation’s highest court.
The same morning that Justice Gorsuch gave his speech, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Janus v. AFSCME. This is a case that will determine whether public sector unions—which represent teachers, nurses, firefighters and police in states and cities across the country—can collect fees from all employees in the workplaces they represent. Justice Gorsuch is widely expected to deliver the court’s deciding vote to strip unions of this ability. A decision along these lines would seriously undercut workers’ freedom to have a real voice to speak out and fight for higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions.
Here’s the rub. Justice Gorsuch’s speech at the Trump hotel was hosted by the Fund for American Studies. And who funds the Fund of American Studies? The Charles Koch Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. The Charles Koch Foundation is dedicated to promoting limited government, free markets and weaker unions; and the Bradley Foundation has worked for decades to, in their own words, “reduce the size and power of public sector unions.” In fact, the Bradley Foundation helped pay the litigation expenses for Janus—the case in which Justice Gorsuch is likely to be the deciding vote. Think about that: Just as the ink was drying on the court’s announcement that it would hear Janus, Justice Gorsuch was off to hobnob with some of the biggest supporters for one side of this important case—the side that wants to deny workers the freedom to build a future that doesn’t hang by a thread at the whim of a few billionaires.
This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has strayed over the ethical line. Take a look, for example, at ABC v. Aereo. The court concluded that Aereo, a small television streaming service, had violated the copyright of broadcasters by capturing signals from television stations and retransmitting programming from those stations to the company’s subscribers. Time Warner—one of the broadcasters who stood to lose if the court allowed the practice—filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the court should side with the broadcaster. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts owned as much as $500,000 in Time Warner stock. Despite this blatant conflict of interest, Roberts would not recuse himself from the case. Instead, he joined the majority in effectively killing the small streaming service.
There are plenty of other examples of ethical conflicts. According to Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group focused on increasing accountability and transparency on the Supreme Court, Justices Roberts, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito owned shares in 53 publicly traded companies as of 2016.
The Code of Conduct for United States Judges requires judges to recuse themselves when certain potential conflicts arise, such as in cases in which the judge, the judge’s spouse or the judge’s minor children have a financial interest or in cases in which the judge has a “personal bias or prejudice” against or for any party in the case. But those rules don’t apply to Supreme Court justices.
In fact, Supreme Court justices are the only federal judges who are not bound by a formal code of conduct. The reason, as explained by Chief Justice Roberts, is that the Supreme Court is the only court created under Article III of the Constitution, while the lower courts are created by Congress. For Chief Justice Roberts, it’s sufficient that the justices consult the code when determining their ethical duties and voluntarily abide by rules on a case-by-case basis.
The chief justice’s argument is exactly backward. When an ethical cloud hangs over the court, its fundamental integrity is compromised. At a time when Gallup polls have found that fewer than half of Americans approve of the way the court is handling its job, the justices ought to be making every effort to show that their personal integrity is above reproach.
It is time to begin rebuilding American’s confidence in the court by establishing a formal code of conduct. That’s why I co-sponsored Sen. Chris Murphy’s Supreme Court Ethics Act, a bill that requires the Supreme Court to adopt an ethical code. As the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court has an even greater duty to set the example for courts around the country and demonstrate that its decisions are based on a fair and unbiased assessment of the facts and the law, not personal biases or their own financial interests. Eliminating ethical questions and conflicts of interests should be the starting point.
Federal judges are not supposed to be politicians or advocates. They are supposed to rise above the political winds of the day and demonstrate a single-minded commitment to one promise: equal justice under law. As judges of the nation’s highest court, it is time for Supreme Court justices to demonstrate that they can meet that standard.
Shock waves...
Podesta's downfall sends shock waves through K Street
The departure of the Democratic super-lobbyist, and indictment of Paul Manafort, has other firms working to make sure they're not next.
By THEODORIC MEYER
Washington lobbyists who represent foreign powers have taken comfort for decades in the fact that the Justice Department rarely goes after them for potentially breaking the law. That all changed on Monday.
The news of Tony Podesta’s resignation from his namesake firm and indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates sent K Street scrambling, as lobbyists rushed to make sure they’re in compliance with the rules. The developments also renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation beefing up the Justice Department’s enforcement of the law, which lawmakers in both parties have derided for lacking teeth.
“Firms are going to be even more careful than they have been in the past in the foreign lobbying arena,” said Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader who’s now a lobbyist at Squire Patton Boggs, where his foreign clients have included Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Lobbyists may start to be more selective about which foreign clients they’ll work for and avoid ones like the nonprofit that hired the Podesta Group and Mercury. That outfit was ostensibly independent, but prosecutors allege it was really under the control of the Ukrainian president.
Squire Patton Boggs, for example, recently turned down work for a potential client tied to Syria, Lott said.
“You need to know who you’re representing, and sometimes it’s kind of shrouded,” Lott said.
Prosecutions of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — which requires lobbyists who represent foreign governments, political parties and other groups seeking to influence American foreign policy to register with the Justice Department — are rare. And it’s not clear whether the Justice Department will follow special counsel Robert Mueller’s lead and start cracking down on foreign lobbying violations.
But lobbyists aren’t taking chances in the wake of Podesta's announced departure from the Podesta Group, long one of Washington's biggest lobbying shops.
“I feel like in the past, people got away with a lot because there was a lot less scrutiny,” said one veteran foreign lobbyist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “People were more willing to find creative ways not to file.”
Now, “I think at least in the short term people are going to be very cautious,” the lobbyist said.
An indictment unsealed on Monday charged Manafort and Gates with crimes including money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy against the United States, in addition to violating foreign lobbying law by orchestrating a “multi-million dollar lobbying campaign” without registering.
The indictment also described two Washington firms, Company A and Company B, that lobbied for a nonprofit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which the indictment alleges was actually under the control of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, his political party and the Ukrainian government. Companies A and B refer to Mercury and the Podesta Group.
Washington’s lobbying firms are now taking steps to ensure that what happened to the Podesta Group doesn't happen to them. Marc Lampkin, a lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck who does foreign work, said the firm sent out a reminder to employees on Monday about “what the rules and the law are, what the reporting requirements are,” in addition to the firm’s regular training in keeping with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“It’s at the top of everyone’s mind,” Lampkin said. “It’s on the TV. Why not take the opportunity to remind everyone what the rules are?”
The DOJ unit dedicated to enforcing FARA is small, and has focused in the past on prodding lobbyists to comply with the law voluntarily, rather than going after them by pressing criminal charges. Mueller’s willingness to indict Manafort and Gates instead of just hounding them to file has struck fear into lobbyists that they could be next.
“It used to be [that the Justice Department would work with you to become compliant,” said another foreign lobbyist, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “Now there’s a fear that they’ll just prosecute you.”
But the bar for criminal prosecution is high. Under the law, prosecutors can go after lobbyists only for willful violation of the law — a tough standard to prove.
Whether the Justice Department follows Mueller’s lead may depend on Congress’ response to the Manafort affair.
Before this week's news, Republican and Democratic lawmakers had raised alarms that foreign lobbyists are getting away with not registering.
“I fear that FARA violations are happening around this town all the time,” Texas' John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said at a Judiciary Committee hearing in July.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced a bill along with Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday designed to strengthen enforcement of foreign lobbying laws. Grassley said the measure had been in the works long before the Manafort indictment was unsealed.
The bill would give the Justice Department power to demand the production of documents and compel testimony. It would eliminate an exemption that allows lobbyists to register under the less onerous domestic lobbying rules for some foreign clients and charge the Justice Department with developing a comprehensive enforcement strategy. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) introduced similar bills earlier this year.
“Policy makers are here to serve the interests of the American people, so we need to know when someone is pushing the priorities of a foreign interest,” Grassley said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again how lobbyists of foreign principals skirt existing disclosure laws to conceal their clients’ identities and agendas.”
But Lott said he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for Congress to pass the legislation, especially with President Donald Trump still pushing to move a tax reform bill by the end of the year.
“There’s not much of anything happening right now in Congress, to be perfectly frank,” Lott said.
The departure of the Democratic super-lobbyist, and indictment of Paul Manafort, has other firms working to make sure they're not next.
By THEODORIC MEYER
Washington lobbyists who represent foreign powers have taken comfort for decades in the fact that the Justice Department rarely goes after them for potentially breaking the law. That all changed on Monday.
The news of Tony Podesta’s resignation from his namesake firm and indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates sent K Street scrambling, as lobbyists rushed to make sure they’re in compliance with the rules. The developments also renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation beefing up the Justice Department’s enforcement of the law, which lawmakers in both parties have derided for lacking teeth.
“Firms are going to be even more careful than they have been in the past in the foreign lobbying arena,” said Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader who’s now a lobbyist at Squire Patton Boggs, where his foreign clients have included Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Lobbyists may start to be more selective about which foreign clients they’ll work for and avoid ones like the nonprofit that hired the Podesta Group and Mercury. That outfit was ostensibly independent, but prosecutors allege it was really under the control of the Ukrainian president.
Squire Patton Boggs, for example, recently turned down work for a potential client tied to Syria, Lott said.
“You need to know who you’re representing, and sometimes it’s kind of shrouded,” Lott said.
Prosecutions of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — which requires lobbyists who represent foreign governments, political parties and other groups seeking to influence American foreign policy to register with the Justice Department — are rare. And it’s not clear whether the Justice Department will follow special counsel Robert Mueller’s lead and start cracking down on foreign lobbying violations.
But lobbyists aren’t taking chances in the wake of Podesta's announced departure from the Podesta Group, long one of Washington's biggest lobbying shops.
“I feel like in the past, people got away with a lot because there was a lot less scrutiny,” said one veteran foreign lobbyist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “People were more willing to find creative ways not to file.”
Now, “I think at least in the short term people are going to be very cautious,” the lobbyist said.
An indictment unsealed on Monday charged Manafort and Gates with crimes including money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy against the United States, in addition to violating foreign lobbying law by orchestrating a “multi-million dollar lobbying campaign” without registering.
The indictment also described two Washington firms, Company A and Company B, that lobbied for a nonprofit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which the indictment alleges was actually under the control of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, his political party and the Ukrainian government. Companies A and B refer to Mercury and the Podesta Group.
Washington’s lobbying firms are now taking steps to ensure that what happened to the Podesta Group doesn't happen to them. Marc Lampkin, a lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck who does foreign work, said the firm sent out a reminder to employees on Monday about “what the rules and the law are, what the reporting requirements are,” in addition to the firm’s regular training in keeping with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“It’s at the top of everyone’s mind,” Lampkin said. “It’s on the TV. Why not take the opportunity to remind everyone what the rules are?”
The DOJ unit dedicated to enforcing FARA is small, and has focused in the past on prodding lobbyists to comply with the law voluntarily, rather than going after them by pressing criminal charges. Mueller’s willingness to indict Manafort and Gates instead of just hounding them to file has struck fear into lobbyists that they could be next.
“It used to be [that the Justice Department would work with you to become compliant,” said another foreign lobbyist, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “Now there’s a fear that they’ll just prosecute you.”
But the bar for criminal prosecution is high. Under the law, prosecutors can go after lobbyists only for willful violation of the law — a tough standard to prove.
Whether the Justice Department follows Mueller’s lead may depend on Congress’ response to the Manafort affair.
Before this week's news, Republican and Democratic lawmakers had raised alarms that foreign lobbyists are getting away with not registering.
“I fear that FARA violations are happening around this town all the time,” Texas' John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said at a Judiciary Committee hearing in July.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced a bill along with Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday designed to strengthen enforcement of foreign lobbying laws. Grassley said the measure had been in the works long before the Manafort indictment was unsealed.
The bill would give the Justice Department power to demand the production of documents and compel testimony. It would eliminate an exemption that allows lobbyists to register under the less onerous domestic lobbying rules for some foreign clients and charge the Justice Department with developing a comprehensive enforcement strategy. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) introduced similar bills earlier this year.
“Policy makers are here to serve the interests of the American people, so we need to know when someone is pushing the priorities of a foreign interest,” Grassley said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again how lobbyists of foreign principals skirt existing disclosure laws to conceal their clients’ identities and agendas.”
But Lott said he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for Congress to pass the legislation, especially with President Donald Trump still pushing to move a tax reform bill by the end of the year.
“There’s not much of anything happening right now in Congress, to be perfectly frank,” Lott said.
Try to focus....
Trump advisers try to focus the president's attention on Asia trip
The president faces a series of delicate situations as he travels through the region on his longest trip yet.
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA, NAHAL TOOSI and JOSH DAWSEY
President Donald Trump has been holed up in a series of rapid-fire briefing sessions on his upcoming 12-day, five-country tour through Asia — an effort the White House hopes will help avoid the kind of diplomatic snafus that have dogged his presidency.
The trip — Trump’s longest yet — comes at a tense moment in Asia, with the threat of the North Korea nuclear program looming. But some of Trump’s advisers believe the time away from Washington will offer the president, who leaves Friday, a brief respite from the Russia-related revelations that have consumed him in recent days.
Trump’s top advisers — including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer — have met with the president in recent days to go over details of the trip, including in an hourlong briefing Friday in the Oval Office, according to administration officials. Top aides have sought to keep the briefings short to avoid overloading the president with details but have scheduled dozens of them to plan public remarks and outline what he should say about North Korea on defense and China on trade.
“We’ve kind of tried to do it in pieces so it’s easy to keep up with,” said another administration official, adding that National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Defense Secretary James Mattis have also briefed the president.
There are numerous ways Trump’s team could run into protocol problems in Asia, where many countries place a premium on proper behavior, said former U.S. officials who specialized in the subject.
The rules cover everything from what colors to wear (avoid all white, because it signifies sorrow) to the proper way to accept a business card (with both hands, look the giver in the eye and never put the card in your back pocket).
But there are limits on how far an American official — especially the president — should go in adhering to cultural sensitivities. For instance, “We don’t bow,” said Donald Ensenat, who served as chief of protocol under President George W. Bush.
Trump’s interactions with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the trip will face special scrutiny, especially in other Asian countries trying to balance their relationships with both Washington and Beijing.
Administration officials said Trump is eager to meet face-to-face again with Xi, a leader with whom he has built a close relationship. The meeting comes at the height of Xi’s power. The Chinese Communist Party recently granted him a new five-year term and did not name a future successor, raising the possibility Xi could stay in power even longer.
But Trump’s recent effusive praise of Xi has raised eyebrows among the White House’s conservative allies, who wonder which Trump will show up to Asia: the hard-charging iconoclast who declared during the campaign that China was “raping” the United States or the smooth-talking deal-maker who sees hope for improved relations.
“It’s my raging nightmare that he’s going to congratulate Xi on his ‘reelection,’” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Trump administration has already made a series of rookie mistakes.
This past summer, a White House news release referred to Xi as the leader of the “Republic of China” instead of the proper “People’s Republic of China,” a diplomatic blunder for which Beijing said the White House apologized.
The “Republic of China” is what Taiwan calls itself. And Taiwan’s relationship with China is another thorny issue Trump may want to avoid raising, especially after his decision to speak directly to Taiwan’s leader during the transition last December prompted emergency meetings between China’s foreign minister and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, in New York.
The upcoming trip — which includes stops in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines as well as China — will put pressure on Trump’s divided advisers to better define what some experts say is a muddled Asia strategy. And it will force the president to navigate a nuanced set of policy issues that have long divided U.S. allies in the region.
White House aides expect the trip to focus on two major themes: the threat of North Korea and trade. Trump hopes to show a united front in opposition to North Korean aggression, according to an administration official, who said the president’s public remarks on the trip will seek to serve as a “reminder that it’s not just us, that the world opposes them.”
Trump’s advisers have clashed for months over the specifics of his Asia strategy, most notably when it comes to trade, even as the National Security Council is in the midst of crafting a more cohesive China strategy.
Hard-line China critics like White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon have been pushing back against more moderate aides, who have warned against imposing steep tariffs on Chinese exports.
The news that Navarro will not be going on the trip has sparked concern among China hawks, who view Navarro’s status in the administration as a signal that Trump will be too soft on China during the trip, a move that they believe could play into Xi’s hands just days after he was elevated to the same status as Mao Zedong.
“The biggest risk is not that he’s going to say something that spoils the U.S.-China relationship, but that he’s going to be so fawning and uncritical of China and Xi Jinping that it raises alarms in the rest of the region about a grand bargain between the U.S. and China,” said Ely Ratner, who advised former Vice President Joe Biden on Asia.
After savaging China on the campaign trail for months, Trump invited Xi to his Mar-a-Lago resort in April in a bid to build a better relationship with the Chinese leader. The two men hit it off, and although Trump has criticized China for not doing enough to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, he has heaped praise on Xi.
“He’s a powerful man. I happen to think he’s a very good person,” Trump said of Xi during an interview with Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs last week, adding later, “People say we have the best relationship of any president-president, because he’s called president also,” he went on to say. “Now some people might call him the king of China. But he’s called president.”
People close to Trump said the president’s apparent embrace of Xi stems from his affinity for aggressive, even authoritarian international leaders.
Few world leaders can get through initial visits to Asia without some screw-up, analysts said.
Tillerson, for example, traveled to China earlier this year and wound up parroting well-known Chinese talking points, such as the need for “mutual respect,” that some Chinese cast as Washington agreeing it would not interfere in Beijing’s core interests.
“People who are inexperienced with China often get played in this way,” Scissors said.
But the U.S., too, can use talking points to its advantage.
The Trump administration has in recent weeks emphasized the term “Indo-Pacific” to describe the region, as opposed to the more traditional “Asia-Pacific.” Though not entirely a new approach — Obama-era officials used “Indo-Pacific” on occasion — it sends a less-than-subtle signal to China about America’s desire to partner with India as that populous nation also rises.
Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said it will be important for Trump to distinguish between what counts as protocol and what’s a power move.
“Too often we’re too solicitous of what Chinese define as protocol when they’re just going to shape the perceptions of the trip to their advantage, both for their people and also for the region,” Blumenthal said. “I’d be very polite and very civil, but I certainly wouldn’t act like we’re going to the Middle Kingdom to pay homage to the emperor.”
The president will face complicated situations beyond Beijing.
During his visit to the Philippines, Trump will have to strike a careful balance between underscoring the importance of the U.S. relationship with the nation and distancing himself from the extrajudicial killings blessed by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte as he wages a war on drugs.
Trump also could be thrust into the middle of a tense dispute between Japan and South Korea over so-called comfort women, the term for the women and girls who were forced to serve Japanese soldiers sexually during World War II. South Korean President Moon Jae-in has said Japan has not done enough to take legal responsibility over the issue, rejecting a 2015 agreement between the two countries.
“That could be a disaster,” an outside adviser to Trump said.
The president’s advisers acknowledge privately that Trump’s unpredictable behavior could complicate the trip in ways big and small, from potentially escalating the crisis on the Korean Peninsula to flouting complicated rules of procedure.
“You never know what he’ll say,” an administration official said, adding that the grueling schedule could heighten the risk of mistakes. An outside adviser to the administration concurred: “The potential for error is huge.”
And on a trip as long as this one, the whole delegation, not just the president, needs to remain alert because a PR disaster can take place at any level, said Capricia Marshall, who served as the U.S. chief of protocol under President Barack Obama.
“In protocol, you are showing respect to another’s culture,” Marshall said. “Frankly, the objective is to create a better relationship.”
The president faces a series of delicate situations as he travels through the region on his longest trip yet.
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA, NAHAL TOOSI and JOSH DAWSEY
President Donald Trump has been holed up in a series of rapid-fire briefing sessions on his upcoming 12-day, five-country tour through Asia — an effort the White House hopes will help avoid the kind of diplomatic snafus that have dogged his presidency.
The trip — Trump’s longest yet — comes at a tense moment in Asia, with the threat of the North Korea nuclear program looming. But some of Trump’s advisers believe the time away from Washington will offer the president, who leaves Friday, a brief respite from the Russia-related revelations that have consumed him in recent days.
Trump’s top advisers — including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer — have met with the president in recent days to go over details of the trip, including in an hourlong briefing Friday in the Oval Office, according to administration officials. Top aides have sought to keep the briefings short to avoid overloading the president with details but have scheduled dozens of them to plan public remarks and outline what he should say about North Korea on defense and China on trade.
“We’ve kind of tried to do it in pieces so it’s easy to keep up with,” said another administration official, adding that National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Defense Secretary James Mattis have also briefed the president.
There are numerous ways Trump’s team could run into protocol problems in Asia, where many countries place a premium on proper behavior, said former U.S. officials who specialized in the subject.
The rules cover everything from what colors to wear (avoid all white, because it signifies sorrow) to the proper way to accept a business card (with both hands, look the giver in the eye and never put the card in your back pocket).
But there are limits on how far an American official — especially the president — should go in adhering to cultural sensitivities. For instance, “We don’t bow,” said Donald Ensenat, who served as chief of protocol under President George W. Bush.
Trump’s interactions with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the trip will face special scrutiny, especially in other Asian countries trying to balance their relationships with both Washington and Beijing.
Administration officials said Trump is eager to meet face-to-face again with Xi, a leader with whom he has built a close relationship. The meeting comes at the height of Xi’s power. The Chinese Communist Party recently granted him a new five-year term and did not name a future successor, raising the possibility Xi could stay in power even longer.
But Trump’s recent effusive praise of Xi has raised eyebrows among the White House’s conservative allies, who wonder which Trump will show up to Asia: the hard-charging iconoclast who declared during the campaign that China was “raping” the United States or the smooth-talking deal-maker who sees hope for improved relations.
“It’s my raging nightmare that he’s going to congratulate Xi on his ‘reelection,’” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Trump administration has already made a series of rookie mistakes.
This past summer, a White House news release referred to Xi as the leader of the “Republic of China” instead of the proper “People’s Republic of China,” a diplomatic blunder for which Beijing said the White House apologized.
The “Republic of China” is what Taiwan calls itself. And Taiwan’s relationship with China is another thorny issue Trump may want to avoid raising, especially after his decision to speak directly to Taiwan’s leader during the transition last December prompted emergency meetings between China’s foreign minister and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, in New York.
The upcoming trip — which includes stops in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines as well as China — will put pressure on Trump’s divided advisers to better define what some experts say is a muddled Asia strategy. And it will force the president to navigate a nuanced set of policy issues that have long divided U.S. allies in the region.
White House aides expect the trip to focus on two major themes: the threat of North Korea and trade. Trump hopes to show a united front in opposition to North Korean aggression, according to an administration official, who said the president’s public remarks on the trip will seek to serve as a “reminder that it’s not just us, that the world opposes them.”
Trump’s advisers have clashed for months over the specifics of his Asia strategy, most notably when it comes to trade, even as the National Security Council is in the midst of crafting a more cohesive China strategy.
Hard-line China critics like White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon have been pushing back against more moderate aides, who have warned against imposing steep tariffs on Chinese exports.
The news that Navarro will not be going on the trip has sparked concern among China hawks, who view Navarro’s status in the administration as a signal that Trump will be too soft on China during the trip, a move that they believe could play into Xi’s hands just days after he was elevated to the same status as Mao Zedong.
“The biggest risk is not that he’s going to say something that spoils the U.S.-China relationship, but that he’s going to be so fawning and uncritical of China and Xi Jinping that it raises alarms in the rest of the region about a grand bargain between the U.S. and China,” said Ely Ratner, who advised former Vice President Joe Biden on Asia.
After savaging China on the campaign trail for months, Trump invited Xi to his Mar-a-Lago resort in April in a bid to build a better relationship with the Chinese leader. The two men hit it off, and although Trump has criticized China for not doing enough to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, he has heaped praise on Xi.
“He’s a powerful man. I happen to think he’s a very good person,” Trump said of Xi during an interview with Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs last week, adding later, “People say we have the best relationship of any president-president, because he’s called president also,” he went on to say. “Now some people might call him the king of China. But he’s called president.”
People close to Trump said the president’s apparent embrace of Xi stems from his affinity for aggressive, even authoritarian international leaders.
Few world leaders can get through initial visits to Asia without some screw-up, analysts said.
Tillerson, for example, traveled to China earlier this year and wound up parroting well-known Chinese talking points, such as the need for “mutual respect,” that some Chinese cast as Washington agreeing it would not interfere in Beijing’s core interests.
“People who are inexperienced with China often get played in this way,” Scissors said.
But the U.S., too, can use talking points to its advantage.
The Trump administration has in recent weeks emphasized the term “Indo-Pacific” to describe the region, as opposed to the more traditional “Asia-Pacific.” Though not entirely a new approach — Obama-era officials used “Indo-Pacific” on occasion — it sends a less-than-subtle signal to China about America’s desire to partner with India as that populous nation also rises.
Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said it will be important for Trump to distinguish between what counts as protocol and what’s a power move.
“Too often we’re too solicitous of what Chinese define as protocol when they’re just going to shape the perceptions of the trip to their advantage, both for their people and also for the region,” Blumenthal said. “I’d be very polite and very civil, but I certainly wouldn’t act like we’re going to the Middle Kingdom to pay homage to the emperor.”
The president will face complicated situations beyond Beijing.
During his visit to the Philippines, Trump will have to strike a careful balance between underscoring the importance of the U.S. relationship with the nation and distancing himself from the extrajudicial killings blessed by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte as he wages a war on drugs.
Trump also could be thrust into the middle of a tense dispute between Japan and South Korea over so-called comfort women, the term for the women and girls who were forced to serve Japanese soldiers sexually during World War II. South Korean President Moon Jae-in has said Japan has not done enough to take legal responsibility over the issue, rejecting a 2015 agreement between the two countries.
“That could be a disaster,” an outside adviser to Trump said.
The president’s advisers acknowledge privately that Trump’s unpredictable behavior could complicate the trip in ways big and small, from potentially escalating the crisis on the Korean Peninsula to flouting complicated rules of procedure.
“You never know what he’ll say,” an administration official said, adding that the grueling schedule could heighten the risk of mistakes. An outside adviser to the administration concurred: “The potential for error is huge.”
And on a trip as long as this one, the whole delegation, not just the president, needs to remain alert because a PR disaster can take place at any level, said Capricia Marshall, who served as the U.S. chief of protocol under President Barack Obama.
“In protocol, you are showing respect to another’s culture,” Marshall said. “Frankly, the objective is to create a better relationship.”
More government jobs?
Trump’s top economist offers solution to unemployment: More government jobs
In the latest edition of the ‘POLITICO Money’ podcast, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett discusses tax policy, drawing Americans back into the workforce and his ‘Dow 36,000’ prediction.
By BEN WHITE
President Donald Trump’s top economist has an unusual idea for dealing with the problem of long-term unemployment: Just have the government hire people.
That’s a New Deal-style idea more closely associated with highly progressive Democrats. But Kevin Hassett, the conservative chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, believes some Americans are so disconnected from the workforce that the best idea to get them working again could be a federal jobs program that would ultimately lead to private-sector employment.
“We’ve not done a good job as a society at thinking about how do we take people who have become discouraged and reconnect them,” Hassett said in the latest edition of the “POLITICO Money” podcast. “And it’s such an urgent problem that government programs that directly hire people might be part of the solution.”
This and other unusual ideas could emerge next year when the White House hopes to pivot from its current tax cut push to an infrastructure bill aimed both at rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges, ports and other national assets and at addressing the shrunken size of the labor force.
To Hassett, long-term unemployment often leads to family breakdown and descent into addiction and other maladies. “People who have been unemployed for more than a year very often don’t ever reconnect to the labor force,” he said. “And very often they fall into sort of downward spirals of personal despair where they end up abusing substances and have a higher risk of divorce. Some of the literature in this area is just absolutely disturbing.”
But before he can turn to that, Hassett remains convinced that the tax cut bill now emerging on Capitol Hill that would slice the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent will in fact add at least $4,000 in increased wages per household over the next several years, a claim many progressive economists do not believe is supported by data.
Hassett called the idea “iron-clad” based on studies of other countries cutting their corporate rate. And he said he believes the increase could be even greater.
He argues that a lower corporate rate and more immediate expensing of capital investments will lead to greater productivity among workers and thus higher wages without big inflationary pressure.
“If you have a supply-side stimulus precisely now, we can get capital deepening back to where it used to be, then you could add a percent to GDP growth,” he said. “And that will increase labor productivity and increase wages but not in a way that’s inflationary.”
Hassett, speaking before the release of the latest tax bill, also criticized a proposal floated by Republicans on Capitol Hill that would limit the amount that workers could contribute with pre-tax dollars to their 401(k) retirement plans. Trump has also sharply criticized the idea, putting the White House at odds with some congressional Republicans leading the tax cut push.
“I await the details on the 401(k), but I agree that 401(k)s are a very, very important part of society that help people save for retirement. And the president has said that he’s very supportive of the current design of 401(k)s, and I agree with him.”
And he defended the administration’s argument, pressed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, that the tax cuts could pay for themselves and possibly even reduce the national debt.
“If you think of the scale of the tax reduction, we are talking about $1.5 trillion and then divide it by 10 years you are talking about $150 billion per year in an economy that is $20 trillion by the end,” he said. “So you don’t really need to have a big growth effect to have Secretary Mnuchin be correct.”
Hassett, an affable economist with friends on both side of the partisan aisle, also spoke about his often-lampooned 1999 book with James Glassman, “Dow 36,000,” that predicted stocks would hit that mark by 2004. Instead, the dot-com bubble burst and stocks tanked.
Hassett described the title of the book as a bit of a “youthful indiscretion” that was also somewhat unfairly maligned. “The point was that people who buy and hold stocks for the long run tend to do well, but that stocks go up and down a lot and it’s scary.”
In the latest edition of the ‘POLITICO Money’ podcast, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett discusses tax policy, drawing Americans back into the workforce and his ‘Dow 36,000’ prediction.
By BEN WHITE
President Donald Trump’s top economist has an unusual idea for dealing with the problem of long-term unemployment: Just have the government hire people.
That’s a New Deal-style idea more closely associated with highly progressive Democrats. But Kevin Hassett, the conservative chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, believes some Americans are so disconnected from the workforce that the best idea to get them working again could be a federal jobs program that would ultimately lead to private-sector employment.
“We’ve not done a good job as a society at thinking about how do we take people who have become discouraged and reconnect them,” Hassett said in the latest edition of the “POLITICO Money” podcast. “And it’s such an urgent problem that government programs that directly hire people might be part of the solution.”
This and other unusual ideas could emerge next year when the White House hopes to pivot from its current tax cut push to an infrastructure bill aimed both at rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges, ports and other national assets and at addressing the shrunken size of the labor force.
To Hassett, long-term unemployment often leads to family breakdown and descent into addiction and other maladies. “People who have been unemployed for more than a year very often don’t ever reconnect to the labor force,” he said. “And very often they fall into sort of downward spirals of personal despair where they end up abusing substances and have a higher risk of divorce. Some of the literature in this area is just absolutely disturbing.”
But before he can turn to that, Hassett remains convinced that the tax cut bill now emerging on Capitol Hill that would slice the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent will in fact add at least $4,000 in increased wages per household over the next several years, a claim many progressive economists do not believe is supported by data.
Hassett called the idea “iron-clad” based on studies of other countries cutting their corporate rate. And he said he believes the increase could be even greater.
He argues that a lower corporate rate and more immediate expensing of capital investments will lead to greater productivity among workers and thus higher wages without big inflationary pressure.
“If you have a supply-side stimulus precisely now, we can get capital deepening back to where it used to be, then you could add a percent to GDP growth,” he said. “And that will increase labor productivity and increase wages but not in a way that’s inflationary.”
Hassett, speaking before the release of the latest tax bill, also criticized a proposal floated by Republicans on Capitol Hill that would limit the amount that workers could contribute with pre-tax dollars to their 401(k) retirement plans. Trump has also sharply criticized the idea, putting the White House at odds with some congressional Republicans leading the tax cut push.
“I await the details on the 401(k), but I agree that 401(k)s are a very, very important part of society that help people save for retirement. And the president has said that he’s very supportive of the current design of 401(k)s, and I agree with him.”
And he defended the administration’s argument, pressed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, that the tax cuts could pay for themselves and possibly even reduce the national debt.
“If you think of the scale of the tax reduction, we are talking about $1.5 trillion and then divide it by 10 years you are talking about $150 billion per year in an economy that is $20 trillion by the end,” he said. “So you don’t really need to have a big growth effect to have Secretary Mnuchin be correct.”
Hassett, an affable economist with friends on both side of the partisan aisle, also spoke about his often-lampooned 1999 book with James Glassman, “Dow 36,000,” that predicted stocks would hit that mark by 2004. Instead, the dot-com bubble burst and stocks tanked.
Hassett described the title of the book as a bit of a “youthful indiscretion” that was also somewhat unfairly maligned. “The point was that people who buy and hold stocks for the long run tend to do well, but that stocks go up and down a lot and it’s scary.”
How stupid is Ditsy??? Really stupid...
The Education of Betsy DeVos
President Donald Trump’s most controversial, ideological Cabinet pick is discovering the limits of her power.
By TIM ALBERTA
It is strange, if a bit unsettling, to see U.S. Marshals constantly hovering near the U.S. secretary of education, a 59-year-old evangelical Christian grandmother whose hobbies are bike riding, yoga and visiting grade schools. But as Betsy DeVos approached Kansas City Academy on a sunny Friday morning in mid-September, it was clear why she wants them there.
It was the final day of her “Rethink School” tour, the familiar fly-around trip taken by a Cabinet secretary to capture some local news coverage and emphasize priorities—in DeVos’ case, to highlight unique and innovative learning environments across the country. But at this particular stop, tension filled the air. Several hundred protesters gathered outside—vastly outnumbering the 76 students, grades 6 through 12, who attend the school—while a procession of speakers denounced DeVos as a destroyer of public education and an enabler of campus rape.
This was not an atypical reception for the billionaire school-choice advocate, who was loathed by the organized left well before President-elect Donald Trump tapped her for a Cabinet post. Inside the modest brick building, however, DeVos encountered something different: walls covered with artwork, designed by the students just for her visit, celebrating equality and civil rights. The school, home to exceptionally gifted kids, is an achievement in social progressivism; many of the students identify as LGBT or are questioning their gender identities, and the culture is one of tolerance. This is why DeVos was welcomed over the objections of some faculty and parents: as a symbol of acceptance. But her visit wasn’t an olive branch to the far left of the academic spectrum; it was an occasion to use what she calls her “bully pulpit,” drawing attention to a private school that is inventive and dynamic, while not-so-subtly contrasting it with local public schools that are not.
Sitting in a second-floor classroom, fielding questions from a dozen students, DeVos likely didn’t win over any of her critics. Asked about the fate of a hypothetical underperforming public school, she said, “The school won’t be able to survive. … Just like we see in lots of other parts of our world, if people don’t choose something, it can’t continue to stay in business.” But for those listening closely, some of the secretary’s answers might have provided relief. The most revelatory exchange came when Kory Gallagher, Kansas City Academy’s principal and government teacher, asked DeVos to explain what her job actually entails. “The Department of Education is there to carry out the laws that are passed by Congress,” she said. “And I think, really key, is that we remember what our role is and not confuse it with the role of Congress—which is to make and pass laws.”
Anyone who witnessed the manic, sky-is-falling opposition to DeVos’ nomination—which grew exponentially via social media during her woefully uneven confirmation hearings—could be excused for believing that DeVos was being handed autocratic power to redraw America’s scholastic landscape. Before coming to Washington, DeVos fought and funded a generation’s worth of education wars on a pair of guiding principles: that parents should be free to send their children wherever they choose, and that tax dollars should follow those students to their new schools. The first enjoys broad public support; it’s the second that made DeVos into a villain in the eyes of public school advocates, who argue she would deplete their classrooms and drain their resources to educate those who remain. “Even the people who believe in charter schools and other private alternatives overwhelmingly believe that you don’t take from one, in a Robin Hood approach, to give to another,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tells me. “Former secretaries of education—even those who believed in charters and vouchers and the kind of rhetoric and ideology that DeVos subscribes to—there’s one huge difference: They actually believed in public schools.”
DeVos may have been Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominee—the first in American history to require a tiebreaking confirmation vote cast by the vice president. Yet she runs the administration’s smallest and arguably least potent federal department; DeVos does not enforce America’s laws like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or direct its international relations like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. And after nine months in office, it has become apparent to the education secretary that she has limited power to transform the nation’s schools. When it comes to the most contentious debates surrounding America’s K-12 system—vouchers, standards, incentives, tests—DeVos had more tangible influence as a private citizen in Michigan than she does now in Washington.
Public schools receive little of their funding from the feds—roughly 9.1 percent in the 2015-16 school year, according to the National Education Association—giving Washington minimal leverage over states and localities. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), seen as a bipartisan rebuke to the perceived overreach of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, further decentralized much of K-12 decision-making to an unprecedented degree. It’s true that the secretary has more autonomy when it comes to higher education: Student loans and regulatory guidance, among other things, are within her purview. But this is not where DeVos has focused her decades of advocacy work—nor was it the focus of the entrenched resistance warning of her plans to decimate the nation’s public schools.
“It’s ironic that she emerged as the Cabinet nominee to draw the strongest and most visceral opposition, given the constraints on the ability of any secretary of education to effect dramatic change in American education,” says Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who served as Mitt Romney’s top education adviser in 2012. “Those constraints are greater now than ever given the restrictions on the secretary’s authority that were built into ESSA.”
This scaled-down role happens to square with DeVos’ small-government worldview. “President Trump and I know our jobs,” she told a Republican conference on Mackinac Island, Michigan, one week after visiting Kansas City Academy. “It’s to get out of the way.” But she clearly had more ambitious aims when taking the job—and has grown frustrated at her inability to achieve them. In several interviews this fall with Politico Magazine, DeVos repeatedly returns to the word “bureaucracy”: how it smothers creativity, blocks innovation, slows change to a glacial pace. When I ask what has surprised her most about the job, DeVos does not hesitate. “The bureaucracy is much more formidable and difficult than I had anticipated—and I expected it to be difficult,” she says. “It’s even worse. And you know, in talking to a lot of the great career staff, it’s like everybody nods their heads when you talk about this … yet it seems like everyone is powerless to do anything about it.”
Everyone except for her. DeVos is currently undertaking an administration-mandated review of the department, from the top down, hunting for inefficiency and excess. From what she has seen so far, DeVos tells me she will recommend a “significantly lighter footprint.” This hints at what some career employees fear: that the new secretary wants to eliminate entire offices within the department, which would both lighten her bureaucratic burden and free up resources for lawmakers to potentially redirect toward her ultimate objective: expanding school choice. For now she has taken a narrower tack, rolling back Obama-era regulations governing higher ed and using her megaphone to preach the gospel of free-market education. Accomplishing any version of her life’s mission—disrupting the K-12 system—hinges on whether she can persuade Congress to alter its model for funding education policy nationwide. And in her first try, earlier this year, she failed.
If there’s one thing DeVos has learned so far, it’s that getting your way in Washington requires time, patience and government savvy—three things she does not have. Armed with ideas, and having transitioned from successful outsider to struggling insider—becoming Public Enemy No. 2 in the process—Betsy DeVos is still capable of shaking up American education. But not to the extent she or her enemies once imagined.
***
The corner office on the Department of Education’s seventh floor is a sterile, placid space, with charcoal-colored carpet and fluorescent lighting. The towering bookcases lining the rear walls are nearly empty, save for a few scattered trinkets. Facing them from across the room sits DeVos at her espresso-finished desk, her binder and a small stack of documents neatly organized, as she writes thank-you notes to people she met on last week’s tour. She sips from a white carton that reads, “BOXED WATER IS BETTER,” explaining that the packaging is more environmentally friendly than plastic—and, upon further questioning, sheepishly admitting that her family actually owns the company.
The suite has one redeeming value: Its wall of northern-facing windows boasts a breathtaking view of the Capitol. In our conversation, one of few lengthy interviews she has given since coming to Washington, DeVos jokes about staring longingly through the glass at the building where real power exists. This represents a glint of charm from someone who admits to being painfully introverted—and whose ivory tower existence has become even more cloistered since she joined Trump’s administration. After DeVos was physically blocked from entering a D.C. public school in February and “shoved” by a demonstrator, she tells me, the U.S. Marshals Service concluded that her threat assessment, in person and online, warranted special protection (to the tune of millions of dollars). That the target is a woman who speaks in such soft tones that listeners find themselves leaning forward says as much about the polarization of Trump’s America as it does the divisiveness of DeVos.
People who know her, and who shudder at the cartooning of DeVos as the Cruella de Vil of Trump’s Cabinet, like to say that she got involved in education “for the right reasons.” That meant, three decades ago, doing something about the fact that her son could afford to escape the local public schools near Grand Rapids—and poor kids could not. What ensued, to the chagrin of her ever-growing group of detractors, was a religiously infused journey to reimagine the relationship between government, parents, teachers and schools.
She herself hailed from a wealthy west Michigan family—her brother is Blackwater founder Erik Prince—but her resources and influence owed to marrying into the billionaire DeVos dynasty, co-owners of the Amway Corporation. Her political power came steadily, first through large donations and later by direct involvement, including her ascent to the chairmanship of Michigan’s Republican Party. This combination of financial muscle and partisan ambition, of course, prompted questions of whether DeVos had purchased herself a Cabinet position. She rolls her eyes at this accusation. For one thing, she was a John Kasich delegate at the 2016 Republican National Convention. More importantly, DeVos insists, she had never thought about the job—that is, until a text message arrived from her old friend Jeb Bush.
It was Bush who, in the days after Trump’s stunning victory, asked DeVos whether she had considered serving as education secretary—and who then contacted Vice President-Elect Mike Pence to recommend her for the job. “He was really the only person I knew in the transition. He was the best person, because he was running it,” Bush tells me, chuckling. The two ex-governors were on the same page: Bush had worked closely alongside DeVos to advance school-choice initiatives in Florida, and Pence forged a similar alliance with her in Indiana. “He made it clear that he was already thinking about Betsy, too,” Bush says.
DeVos soon found herself preparing for Senate testimony. No stranger to party-line conflict, she was nevertheless taken aback at how intense the process became. Teachers unions remain the most organized cell of the Democratic coalition, but much of the outcry over her performance was organic and owed to self-inflicted wounds: showing no understanding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; fumbling straightforward questions about accountability, proficiency and growth; citing grizzly bears in Wyoming as the reason some schools should be free to keep guns on premises.
In retrospect, DeVos tells me, she blames the transition team for its handling of her confirmation. “I think I was undercoached,” she says. “The transition group was very circumspect about how much information they gave me about then-current policy and … it was in their view a balance between being prepared for a confirmation hearing and not having well-formed opinions on what should or shouldn’t change, so as not to get caught in a confirmation hearing making commitments that then I wouldn’t want to or be able to keep. And in hindsight, I wish I had a whole lot more information.”
She also flashes irritation recalling how she wasn’t permitted to do any interviews of her own, not even “Good Morning America” or a similarly friendly venue from which to defend herself. “During the confirmation process, I wasn’t able to talk with the media at all. I wasn’t able to express anything from my perspective,” she says. “So it gave weeks and weeks of open shots for my opponents to take.”
Of course, these things were interrelated: DeVos’ manifest lack of knowledge about the department’s portfolio spawned negative news coverage. After two Republican senators defected, it took Pence’s historic vote to confirm her. (She keeps a framed replica of that Senate roll-call record in her office.) The “weeks and weeks of open shots” put DeVos at a deficit entering the Education Department. And despite her best efforts to learn the culture and gain acceptance—she walked every floor of the department’s D.C. buildings her first day and greeted every employee she could find—DeVos today seems to be treading water.
She has yet to fill senior staff positions, and it’s widely known that numerous prominent Republicans having turned down offers. She has struggled to acclimate to the proverbial big ship that turns slowly. Perhaps most significant, she failed to persuade the committees of jurisdiction in Congress to approve her and the department’s budget request, which would have slashed funding to other initiatives in the name of expanding DeVos’ pet cause, school choice. It amounted to an embarrassing repudiation of a president and a secretary in their first year, when there is traditionally the most political capital to spend—especially considering Republicans control both the House and Senate.
When I ask about the lack of school-choice funding, DeVos tries to downplay her disappointment. “Well, let’s keep in mind that this is only the first budget cycle,” she says. “There are other budget cycles.” That much is true, but it won’t get any easier going forward. And taken together with other setbacks, people I spoke with across the ideological spectrum said the budget defeat was illustrative of a secretary getting more than she bargained for.
“She can talk about bureaucracy and how constraining it is for her, but a Republican-controlled Congress rejected her budget proposals. She can’t fill her senior staff slots. Morale is terrible at the department,” says Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an independent education think tank at Georgetown’s McCord School of Public Policy. “And I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long. And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left. I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”
That assessment was somewhat harsher than those I heard from a handful of department employees. They were startled by DeVos’ nomination and remain uninspired by her command of internal processes. Yet the response to most questions about the department’s vitality is a collective shrug—the implication being that DeVos has realized she can only do so much, and has shown neither the appetite nor the ability to do more.
***
Some years ago, DeVos was mugged while sightseeing in Barcelona. A man ran into her and grabbed onto her expensive handbag—but DeVos refused to let go. She held onto the handle while he began to run away, which sent her flying through the air and resulted in a serious knee injury that required surgery. She tells me this story not as a political metaphor—we were simply comparing notes on knee problems—but it’s oddly appropriate. DeVos is a billionaire and could afford another handbag. There was no reason to risk her safety. But that wasn’t the point: She wasn’t going to give in. The same dynamic was visible during her first week on the job, when DeVos was physically prevented from entering the public school in D.C. “We got back in the car and the security detail said, ‘Ma’am, I don’t think we should go back there,’” Devos recalls. “I said, ‘No, we are going back. They are not going to win.’” She pauses, and her voice, for the only time in our conversations, flickers with emotion. “I was so angry.”
DeVos did go back. And she did enter the school.
Anyone betting against DeVos serving all four years of Trump’s first term—which, she tells me, she plans to do—is underestimating the sense of duty and moral righteousness deeply embedded in someone who could be doing just about anything else right now. “She’s not somebody who ever needed to do politics or needed to be involved in education,” John Engler, Michigan’s former governor, told me on Mackinac Island. He has witnessed firsthand the indefatigability of DeVos: In 2000, when Engler was governor and DeVos ran the state party, they split on the question of pursuing a ballot measure that November authorizing public funds for private schools. When Engler overruled DeVos, saying the timing was poor, she quit in protest and financed the voucher campaign herself. (It failed in lopsided fashion.)
This time around, instead of planning her exit strategy, DeVos appears to be hunkering down and mapping out where she can maximize her impact.
On the K-12 front, her school-choice crusade is being downsized to what can fairly be described as a cheerleading campaign. With little actual policymaking power, DeVos has decided she can be most effective traveling the country and encouraging states and localities to do that which Washington cannot (and, in her view, should not) make them do. “The opportunity of talking from a bully pulpit about what needs to happen—rethinking school, innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial activity around education, those kinds of things—can have a much broader and longer impact, I think, than a lot of machination within a bureaucracy,” DeVos says.
This was the point of her recent tour. At several stops, she was asked whether her visit was to gather information for policymaking. It wasn’t. While past education secretaries tended to visit a wide range of schools, DeVos has been intent on showcasing primarily those that reflect her priorities: unique, adaptive programs that break from the rigid norms of public education. It could be argued that she had greater impact promoting these ideas as a private citizen, wielding the millions of dollars she pumped into school-choice initiatives. But there were no media crews showing up at charter schools with DeVos until nine months ago; no front-page news stories or protests to greet her arrival. She now has a household name—which, ironically, the contentious confirmation process bestowed on her—and plans to weaponize it.
Omaha, Neb. DeVos’ fall tour included a stop at Nelson Mandela Elementary, a private school for low-income children, kindergarten through third grade, all of whom play the violin and march silently between morning classes. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine
This, unsurprisingly, doesn’t go over well with her adversaries. When we stopped in at Nelson Mandela Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska—a remarkable private school for low-income children, kindergarten through third grade, all of whom play the violin and march silently between morning classes—DeVos held a roundtable with educators. There were officials from Nelson Mandela, but also from the Omaha Public Schools. Its superintendent, Mark Evans, told me he is happy to work closely with Nelson Mandela because Nebraska is one of seven states that does not allow charters—meaning public and private schools aren’t competing for funding. That wasn’t the case at his previous post in Missouri, he said, where “the best kids” fled for alternative schools and left public education in the Kansas City area underfunded. At the end of the roundtable, Evans made a show of giving DeVos a shirt reading: “I ♥ Public Schools.”
DeVos is clearly bothered by the perception that she’s out to abolish public education in America, mentioning multiple times that it’s the biggest misconception about her. “I mean, nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “Public schools are great. Great public schools are really great. But no school is as great as it can be.”
Allies point to her surprisingly terse speech to a charter-school conference earlier this year in which she warned that complacency, which she believes has long plagued public schools, was rearing its head in charters as well—and would not be tolerated. The point, they say, is that DeVos has heard the criticism and is determined to champion good schools and chew out bad schools, whether public or private. So far, she has done lots of the former and little of the latter. When DeVos trades in photo ops at phenomenal schools for tough-love discussions at failing ones, the mob of reporters and protesters will get bigger—and so will her bully pulpit.
***
For all the lack of authority to remake K-12, the education secretary enjoys significant leverage in American higher education. This has resulted in some predictable swings in policy based on the politics of the administration in power, and in DeVos’ case that has meant undoing much of what Obama’s secretaries did.
Already since taking office, DeVos’ department has deregulated the for-profit college industry that was targeted by Obama for its abuses and lack of accountability; revised the rule for defrauded students to gain loan forgiveness; attempted to consolidate all student loans under one servicing company, a plan she later abandoned; and, most notably, rescinded the Obama-era guidance on Title IX as it pertained to sexual assault cases on campus.
To DeVos and her counterparts at other agencies, Obama’s overreach offers easy early victories that align with Trump’s anti-regulatory zeal and a laissez-faire approach to government. To opponents, it speaks to the administration’s lack of constructive goals. “It’s hard watching someone whose only vision is undoing everything we did for eight years,” says Matt Lehrich, an Obama appointee to the department who served under secretaries Arne Duncan and John King.
DeVos’ legacy as secretary, however, might not be that simple. Against a backdrop of attacks on her ability to do the job, there has been a general consensus that she has demonstrated a studied and evenhanded approach to the Title IX guidance. When she announced in September that her department would write new rules for how colleges should arbitrate sexual assault cases, she was predictably bludgeoned by some on the left. But there had long been growing concern in academic and legal circles about the Obama policy instructing colleges to weigh the “preponderance of the evidence” in determining the guilt of the accused (meaning, a student could be expelled if 51 percent of the evidence suggested he or she was guilty). The hearings that resulted on campuses often ignored due process; schools could deny the accused a lawyer and forbid him or her from cross-examining the complainant or witnesses, among other restrictions. For these reasons, amid some hysterical responses, DeVos received plaudits from unusual places: The Washington Post editorialized that her approach was “right on target”; liberal writers showered her with credit-where-it’s-due plaudits in Slate, the New Yorker and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The trick for fair-minded observers will be distinguishing between not just what DeVos gets right and gets wrong, but what she is and is not responsible for. For one thing, she isn’t unique in facing fierce opposition on the job; the same teachers unions that despise her tried to run Duncan out of town, too, and objected to King as his replacement. She was also blamed for the Trump administration’s decision to reverse Obama’s guidance to public schools on transgender bathroom usage. But that decision was made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who had jurisdiction on the matter—and one, according to people close to DeVos, she vehemently disagreed with. “I didn’t feel the timing was appropriate,” she tells me, measuring her words, in her first public break with the administration.
This sort of nuance has been swept away by the passion of education debates and, more broadly, the frenzied nature of the Trump news cycle. But if the education of Betsy DeVos has been discovering the relative limits of her authority on the job, the American people, if they study her closely, might find themselves learning a similar lesson.
“There were some students who said, ‘We shouldn’t let her in,’ and there was some education to do on our end,” Gallagher, the Kansas City Academy principal, told me after DeVos’ visit. “It’s like, ‘Guys, the Department of Education on the federal level is not the beast you imagined it to be.’” Gallagher glanced toward his kids and told me of a classroom discussion earlier this year. “Our students were very upset about the transgender bathroom reversal. And I had to have a conversation, ‘Guys, it actually wasn’t the Department of Education. That’s the Department of Justice,’” he said. “‘I understand your anger. I’m with you. But she didn’t do that. So let’s try to be responsible about what we’re attributing to her and what we’re not.’”
President Donald Trump’s most controversial, ideological Cabinet pick is discovering the limits of her power.
By TIM ALBERTA
It is strange, if a bit unsettling, to see U.S. Marshals constantly hovering near the U.S. secretary of education, a 59-year-old evangelical Christian grandmother whose hobbies are bike riding, yoga and visiting grade schools. But as Betsy DeVos approached Kansas City Academy on a sunny Friday morning in mid-September, it was clear why she wants them there.
It was the final day of her “Rethink School” tour, the familiar fly-around trip taken by a Cabinet secretary to capture some local news coverage and emphasize priorities—in DeVos’ case, to highlight unique and innovative learning environments across the country. But at this particular stop, tension filled the air. Several hundred protesters gathered outside—vastly outnumbering the 76 students, grades 6 through 12, who attend the school—while a procession of speakers denounced DeVos as a destroyer of public education and an enabler of campus rape.
This was not an atypical reception for the billionaire school-choice advocate, who was loathed by the organized left well before President-elect Donald Trump tapped her for a Cabinet post. Inside the modest brick building, however, DeVos encountered something different: walls covered with artwork, designed by the students just for her visit, celebrating equality and civil rights. The school, home to exceptionally gifted kids, is an achievement in social progressivism; many of the students identify as LGBT or are questioning their gender identities, and the culture is one of tolerance. This is why DeVos was welcomed over the objections of some faculty and parents: as a symbol of acceptance. But her visit wasn’t an olive branch to the far left of the academic spectrum; it was an occasion to use what she calls her “bully pulpit,” drawing attention to a private school that is inventive and dynamic, while not-so-subtly contrasting it with local public schools that are not.
Sitting in a second-floor classroom, fielding questions from a dozen students, DeVos likely didn’t win over any of her critics. Asked about the fate of a hypothetical underperforming public school, she said, “The school won’t be able to survive. … Just like we see in lots of other parts of our world, if people don’t choose something, it can’t continue to stay in business.” But for those listening closely, some of the secretary’s answers might have provided relief. The most revelatory exchange came when Kory Gallagher, Kansas City Academy’s principal and government teacher, asked DeVos to explain what her job actually entails. “The Department of Education is there to carry out the laws that are passed by Congress,” she said. “And I think, really key, is that we remember what our role is and not confuse it with the role of Congress—which is to make and pass laws.”
Anyone who witnessed the manic, sky-is-falling opposition to DeVos’ nomination—which grew exponentially via social media during her woefully uneven confirmation hearings—could be excused for believing that DeVos was being handed autocratic power to redraw America’s scholastic landscape. Before coming to Washington, DeVos fought and funded a generation’s worth of education wars on a pair of guiding principles: that parents should be free to send their children wherever they choose, and that tax dollars should follow those students to their new schools. The first enjoys broad public support; it’s the second that made DeVos into a villain in the eyes of public school advocates, who argue she would deplete their classrooms and drain their resources to educate those who remain. “Even the people who believe in charter schools and other private alternatives overwhelmingly believe that you don’t take from one, in a Robin Hood approach, to give to another,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tells me. “Former secretaries of education—even those who believed in charters and vouchers and the kind of rhetoric and ideology that DeVos subscribes to—there’s one huge difference: They actually believed in public schools.”
DeVos may have been Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominee—the first in American history to require a tiebreaking confirmation vote cast by the vice president. Yet she runs the administration’s smallest and arguably least potent federal department; DeVos does not enforce America’s laws like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or direct its international relations like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. And after nine months in office, it has become apparent to the education secretary that she has limited power to transform the nation’s schools. When it comes to the most contentious debates surrounding America’s K-12 system—vouchers, standards, incentives, tests—DeVos had more tangible influence as a private citizen in Michigan than she does now in Washington.
Public schools receive little of their funding from the feds—roughly 9.1 percent in the 2015-16 school year, according to the National Education Association—giving Washington minimal leverage over states and localities. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), seen as a bipartisan rebuke to the perceived overreach of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, further decentralized much of K-12 decision-making to an unprecedented degree. It’s true that the secretary has more autonomy when it comes to higher education: Student loans and regulatory guidance, among other things, are within her purview. But this is not where DeVos has focused her decades of advocacy work—nor was it the focus of the entrenched resistance warning of her plans to decimate the nation’s public schools.
“It’s ironic that she emerged as the Cabinet nominee to draw the strongest and most visceral opposition, given the constraints on the ability of any secretary of education to effect dramatic change in American education,” says Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who served as Mitt Romney’s top education adviser in 2012. “Those constraints are greater now than ever given the restrictions on the secretary’s authority that were built into ESSA.”
This scaled-down role happens to square with DeVos’ small-government worldview. “President Trump and I know our jobs,” she told a Republican conference on Mackinac Island, Michigan, one week after visiting Kansas City Academy. “It’s to get out of the way.” But she clearly had more ambitious aims when taking the job—and has grown frustrated at her inability to achieve them. In several interviews this fall with Politico Magazine, DeVos repeatedly returns to the word “bureaucracy”: how it smothers creativity, blocks innovation, slows change to a glacial pace. When I ask what has surprised her most about the job, DeVos does not hesitate. “The bureaucracy is much more formidable and difficult than I had anticipated—and I expected it to be difficult,” she says. “It’s even worse. And you know, in talking to a lot of the great career staff, it’s like everybody nods their heads when you talk about this … yet it seems like everyone is powerless to do anything about it.”
Everyone except for her. DeVos is currently undertaking an administration-mandated review of the department, from the top down, hunting for inefficiency and excess. From what she has seen so far, DeVos tells me she will recommend a “significantly lighter footprint.” This hints at what some career employees fear: that the new secretary wants to eliminate entire offices within the department, which would both lighten her bureaucratic burden and free up resources for lawmakers to potentially redirect toward her ultimate objective: expanding school choice. For now she has taken a narrower tack, rolling back Obama-era regulations governing higher ed and using her megaphone to preach the gospel of free-market education. Accomplishing any version of her life’s mission—disrupting the K-12 system—hinges on whether she can persuade Congress to alter its model for funding education policy nationwide. And in her first try, earlier this year, she failed.
If there’s one thing DeVos has learned so far, it’s that getting your way in Washington requires time, patience and government savvy—three things she does not have. Armed with ideas, and having transitioned from successful outsider to struggling insider—becoming Public Enemy No. 2 in the process—Betsy DeVos is still capable of shaking up American education. But not to the extent she or her enemies once imagined.
***
The corner office on the Department of Education’s seventh floor is a sterile, placid space, with charcoal-colored carpet and fluorescent lighting. The towering bookcases lining the rear walls are nearly empty, save for a few scattered trinkets. Facing them from across the room sits DeVos at her espresso-finished desk, her binder and a small stack of documents neatly organized, as she writes thank-you notes to people she met on last week’s tour. She sips from a white carton that reads, “BOXED WATER IS BETTER,” explaining that the packaging is more environmentally friendly than plastic—and, upon further questioning, sheepishly admitting that her family actually owns the company.
The suite has one redeeming value: Its wall of northern-facing windows boasts a breathtaking view of the Capitol. In our conversation, one of few lengthy interviews she has given since coming to Washington, DeVos jokes about staring longingly through the glass at the building where real power exists. This represents a glint of charm from someone who admits to being painfully introverted—and whose ivory tower existence has become even more cloistered since she joined Trump’s administration. After DeVos was physically blocked from entering a D.C. public school in February and “shoved” by a demonstrator, she tells me, the U.S. Marshals Service concluded that her threat assessment, in person and online, warranted special protection (to the tune of millions of dollars). That the target is a woman who speaks in such soft tones that listeners find themselves leaning forward says as much about the polarization of Trump’s America as it does the divisiveness of DeVos.
People who know her, and who shudder at the cartooning of DeVos as the Cruella de Vil of Trump’s Cabinet, like to say that she got involved in education “for the right reasons.” That meant, three decades ago, doing something about the fact that her son could afford to escape the local public schools near Grand Rapids—and poor kids could not. What ensued, to the chagrin of her ever-growing group of detractors, was a religiously infused journey to reimagine the relationship between government, parents, teachers and schools.
She herself hailed from a wealthy west Michigan family—her brother is Blackwater founder Erik Prince—but her resources and influence owed to marrying into the billionaire DeVos dynasty, co-owners of the Amway Corporation. Her political power came steadily, first through large donations and later by direct involvement, including her ascent to the chairmanship of Michigan’s Republican Party. This combination of financial muscle and partisan ambition, of course, prompted questions of whether DeVos had purchased herself a Cabinet position. She rolls her eyes at this accusation. For one thing, she was a John Kasich delegate at the 2016 Republican National Convention. More importantly, DeVos insists, she had never thought about the job—that is, until a text message arrived from her old friend Jeb Bush.
It was Bush who, in the days after Trump’s stunning victory, asked DeVos whether she had considered serving as education secretary—and who then contacted Vice President-Elect Mike Pence to recommend her for the job. “He was really the only person I knew in the transition. He was the best person, because he was running it,” Bush tells me, chuckling. The two ex-governors were on the same page: Bush had worked closely alongside DeVos to advance school-choice initiatives in Florida, and Pence forged a similar alliance with her in Indiana. “He made it clear that he was already thinking about Betsy, too,” Bush says.
DeVos soon found herself preparing for Senate testimony. No stranger to party-line conflict, she was nevertheless taken aback at how intense the process became. Teachers unions remain the most organized cell of the Democratic coalition, but much of the outcry over her performance was organic and owed to self-inflicted wounds: showing no understanding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; fumbling straightforward questions about accountability, proficiency and growth; citing grizzly bears in Wyoming as the reason some schools should be free to keep guns on premises.
In retrospect, DeVos tells me, she blames the transition team for its handling of her confirmation. “I think I was undercoached,” she says. “The transition group was very circumspect about how much information they gave me about then-current policy and … it was in their view a balance between being prepared for a confirmation hearing and not having well-formed opinions on what should or shouldn’t change, so as not to get caught in a confirmation hearing making commitments that then I wouldn’t want to or be able to keep. And in hindsight, I wish I had a whole lot more information.”
She also flashes irritation recalling how she wasn’t permitted to do any interviews of her own, not even “Good Morning America” or a similarly friendly venue from which to defend herself. “During the confirmation process, I wasn’t able to talk with the media at all. I wasn’t able to express anything from my perspective,” she says. “So it gave weeks and weeks of open shots for my opponents to take.”
Of course, these things were interrelated: DeVos’ manifest lack of knowledge about the department’s portfolio spawned negative news coverage. After two Republican senators defected, it took Pence’s historic vote to confirm her. (She keeps a framed replica of that Senate roll-call record in her office.) The “weeks and weeks of open shots” put DeVos at a deficit entering the Education Department. And despite her best efforts to learn the culture and gain acceptance—she walked every floor of the department’s D.C. buildings her first day and greeted every employee she could find—DeVos today seems to be treading water.
She has yet to fill senior staff positions, and it’s widely known that numerous prominent Republicans having turned down offers. She has struggled to acclimate to the proverbial big ship that turns slowly. Perhaps most significant, she failed to persuade the committees of jurisdiction in Congress to approve her and the department’s budget request, which would have slashed funding to other initiatives in the name of expanding DeVos’ pet cause, school choice. It amounted to an embarrassing repudiation of a president and a secretary in their first year, when there is traditionally the most political capital to spend—especially considering Republicans control both the House and Senate.
When I ask about the lack of school-choice funding, DeVos tries to downplay her disappointment. “Well, let’s keep in mind that this is only the first budget cycle,” she says. “There are other budget cycles.” That much is true, but it won’t get any easier going forward. And taken together with other setbacks, people I spoke with across the ideological spectrum said the budget defeat was illustrative of a secretary getting more than she bargained for.
“She can talk about bureaucracy and how constraining it is for her, but a Republican-controlled Congress rejected her budget proposals. She can’t fill her senior staff slots. Morale is terrible at the department,” says Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an independent education think tank at Georgetown’s McCord School of Public Policy. “And I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long. And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left. I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”
That assessment was somewhat harsher than those I heard from a handful of department employees. They were startled by DeVos’ nomination and remain uninspired by her command of internal processes. Yet the response to most questions about the department’s vitality is a collective shrug—the implication being that DeVos has realized she can only do so much, and has shown neither the appetite nor the ability to do more.
***
Some years ago, DeVos was mugged while sightseeing in Barcelona. A man ran into her and grabbed onto her expensive handbag—but DeVos refused to let go. She held onto the handle while he began to run away, which sent her flying through the air and resulted in a serious knee injury that required surgery. She tells me this story not as a political metaphor—we were simply comparing notes on knee problems—but it’s oddly appropriate. DeVos is a billionaire and could afford another handbag. There was no reason to risk her safety. But that wasn’t the point: She wasn’t going to give in. The same dynamic was visible during her first week on the job, when DeVos was physically prevented from entering the public school in D.C. “We got back in the car and the security detail said, ‘Ma’am, I don’t think we should go back there,’” Devos recalls. “I said, ‘No, we are going back. They are not going to win.’” She pauses, and her voice, for the only time in our conversations, flickers with emotion. “I was so angry.”
DeVos did go back. And she did enter the school.
Anyone betting against DeVos serving all four years of Trump’s first term—which, she tells me, she plans to do—is underestimating the sense of duty and moral righteousness deeply embedded in someone who could be doing just about anything else right now. “She’s not somebody who ever needed to do politics or needed to be involved in education,” John Engler, Michigan’s former governor, told me on Mackinac Island. He has witnessed firsthand the indefatigability of DeVos: In 2000, when Engler was governor and DeVos ran the state party, they split on the question of pursuing a ballot measure that November authorizing public funds for private schools. When Engler overruled DeVos, saying the timing was poor, she quit in protest and financed the voucher campaign herself. (It failed in lopsided fashion.)
This time around, instead of planning her exit strategy, DeVos appears to be hunkering down and mapping out where she can maximize her impact.
On the K-12 front, her school-choice crusade is being downsized to what can fairly be described as a cheerleading campaign. With little actual policymaking power, DeVos has decided she can be most effective traveling the country and encouraging states and localities to do that which Washington cannot (and, in her view, should not) make them do. “The opportunity of talking from a bully pulpit about what needs to happen—rethinking school, innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial activity around education, those kinds of things—can have a much broader and longer impact, I think, than a lot of machination within a bureaucracy,” DeVos says.
This was the point of her recent tour. At several stops, she was asked whether her visit was to gather information for policymaking. It wasn’t. While past education secretaries tended to visit a wide range of schools, DeVos has been intent on showcasing primarily those that reflect her priorities: unique, adaptive programs that break from the rigid norms of public education. It could be argued that she had greater impact promoting these ideas as a private citizen, wielding the millions of dollars she pumped into school-choice initiatives. But there were no media crews showing up at charter schools with DeVos until nine months ago; no front-page news stories or protests to greet her arrival. She now has a household name—which, ironically, the contentious confirmation process bestowed on her—and plans to weaponize it.
Omaha, Neb. DeVos’ fall tour included a stop at Nelson Mandela Elementary, a private school for low-income children, kindergarten through third grade, all of whom play the violin and march silently between morning classes. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine
This, unsurprisingly, doesn’t go over well with her adversaries. When we stopped in at Nelson Mandela Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska—a remarkable private school for low-income children, kindergarten through third grade, all of whom play the violin and march silently between morning classes—DeVos held a roundtable with educators. There were officials from Nelson Mandela, but also from the Omaha Public Schools. Its superintendent, Mark Evans, told me he is happy to work closely with Nelson Mandela because Nebraska is one of seven states that does not allow charters—meaning public and private schools aren’t competing for funding. That wasn’t the case at his previous post in Missouri, he said, where “the best kids” fled for alternative schools and left public education in the Kansas City area underfunded. At the end of the roundtable, Evans made a show of giving DeVos a shirt reading: “I ♥ Public Schools.”
DeVos is clearly bothered by the perception that she’s out to abolish public education in America, mentioning multiple times that it’s the biggest misconception about her. “I mean, nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “Public schools are great. Great public schools are really great. But no school is as great as it can be.”
Allies point to her surprisingly terse speech to a charter-school conference earlier this year in which she warned that complacency, which she believes has long plagued public schools, was rearing its head in charters as well—and would not be tolerated. The point, they say, is that DeVos has heard the criticism and is determined to champion good schools and chew out bad schools, whether public or private. So far, she has done lots of the former and little of the latter. When DeVos trades in photo ops at phenomenal schools for tough-love discussions at failing ones, the mob of reporters and protesters will get bigger—and so will her bully pulpit.
***
For all the lack of authority to remake K-12, the education secretary enjoys significant leverage in American higher education. This has resulted in some predictable swings in policy based on the politics of the administration in power, and in DeVos’ case that has meant undoing much of what Obama’s secretaries did.
Already since taking office, DeVos’ department has deregulated the for-profit college industry that was targeted by Obama for its abuses and lack of accountability; revised the rule for defrauded students to gain loan forgiveness; attempted to consolidate all student loans under one servicing company, a plan she later abandoned; and, most notably, rescinded the Obama-era guidance on Title IX as it pertained to sexual assault cases on campus.
To DeVos and her counterparts at other agencies, Obama’s overreach offers easy early victories that align with Trump’s anti-regulatory zeal and a laissez-faire approach to government. To opponents, it speaks to the administration’s lack of constructive goals. “It’s hard watching someone whose only vision is undoing everything we did for eight years,” says Matt Lehrich, an Obama appointee to the department who served under secretaries Arne Duncan and John King.
DeVos’ legacy as secretary, however, might not be that simple. Against a backdrop of attacks on her ability to do the job, there has been a general consensus that she has demonstrated a studied and evenhanded approach to the Title IX guidance. When she announced in September that her department would write new rules for how colleges should arbitrate sexual assault cases, she was predictably bludgeoned by some on the left. But there had long been growing concern in academic and legal circles about the Obama policy instructing colleges to weigh the “preponderance of the evidence” in determining the guilt of the accused (meaning, a student could be expelled if 51 percent of the evidence suggested he or she was guilty). The hearings that resulted on campuses often ignored due process; schools could deny the accused a lawyer and forbid him or her from cross-examining the complainant or witnesses, among other restrictions. For these reasons, amid some hysterical responses, DeVos received plaudits from unusual places: The Washington Post editorialized that her approach was “right on target”; liberal writers showered her with credit-where-it’s-due plaudits in Slate, the New Yorker and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The trick for fair-minded observers will be distinguishing between not just what DeVos gets right and gets wrong, but what she is and is not responsible for. For one thing, she isn’t unique in facing fierce opposition on the job; the same teachers unions that despise her tried to run Duncan out of town, too, and objected to King as his replacement. She was also blamed for the Trump administration’s decision to reverse Obama’s guidance to public schools on transgender bathroom usage. But that decision was made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who had jurisdiction on the matter—and one, according to people close to DeVos, she vehemently disagreed with. “I didn’t feel the timing was appropriate,” she tells me, measuring her words, in her first public break with the administration.
This sort of nuance has been swept away by the passion of education debates and, more broadly, the frenzied nature of the Trump news cycle. But if the education of Betsy DeVos has been discovering the relative limits of her authority on the job, the American people, if they study her closely, might find themselves learning a similar lesson.
“There were some students who said, ‘We shouldn’t let her in,’ and there was some education to do on our end,” Gallagher, the Kansas City Academy principal, told me after DeVos’ visit. “It’s like, ‘Guys, the Department of Education on the federal level is not the beast you imagined it to be.’” Gallagher glanced toward his kids and told me of a classroom discussion earlier this year. “Our students were very upset about the transgender bathroom reversal. And I had to have a conversation, ‘Guys, it actually wasn’t the Department of Education. That’s the Department of Justice,’” he said. “‘I understand your anger. I’m with you. But she didn’t do that. So let’s try to be responsible about what we’re attributing to her and what we’re not.’”
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