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  • 2017-02-08 (xsd:date)
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  • DeVos Family Campaign Contributions (en)
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  • On 7 February 2017, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education in the new Trump administration by a narrow 51-50 margin, with the tie-breaking vote being cast by Vice President Mike Pence. All of the votes approving DeVos were cast by Republican senators, leading some of her detractors to posit the theory that she had essentially paid for her position via campaign contributions. That theory was illustrated by several charts circulated online that allegedly documented the amount of money DeVos had contributed to various senators: The above-displayed chart first appeared on Reddit, but the data it incorporates was taken from a report published by the Center for American Progress. That report included another chart showing the DeVos family's campaign contributions: A similar report filed by the Center for Responsive Politics stated that Betsy DeVos and her relatives have given at least $20.2 million to Republican candidates, party committees, PACs and super PACs since 1989: However, these charts don't show how much Betsy DeVos personally contributed to Republican campaigns. A second chart from the Center for Responsive Politics documented that Betsy DeVos herself was only responsible for about 7% of these contributions: It should also be noted that these charts tally cumulative donations made over the span of two and a half decades (although the 2016 campaign cycle comprised the bulk of those donations). None of this information in itself establishes that the contributions were made with the intent of gaining office for Betsy DeVos, or that they had that effect (intended or not). Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, received $43,200 from the DeVos family but voted No during Betsy DeVos' confirmation hearing. And although nearly all the Republican senators who had received contributions from the DeVos family voted Yes, so did all the Republican senators who had not received any contributions from the DeVos family. The Washington Post posited a much more likely explanation for the confirmation vote breakdown — partisanship: The Washington Post also noted that while the DeVos family contributed millions of dollars to Republican candidates, their contributions constituted only a sliver of the total money raised by those campaigns: It's no secret that DeVos and her family have been major donors to the Republican Party over the last few decades. In 1997, DeVos wrote that her family was the largest single contributor of soft money to the Republicans: During DeVos' confirmation hearing in January 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders asked her about how much her family had contributed to the Republican Party over the years, and she averred that an estimate of about $200 million might be accurate: Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told Politico that the DeVos family's contributions were made legally and were properly disclosed: A spokesperson for Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was singled out for having received nearly $100,000 from the DeVos family, defended his acceptance of those contributions: (en)
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