Despite the controversy surrounding Betsy DeVos, the Farrell Report was one of the first to note that her approval to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education was not in doubt. When you have contributed more than $400 million to members of both political parties, you can win a majority vote. Republicans won Tuesday’s high noon shootout at the Senate’s OK corral with 51 votes. The process could have been concluded last week, but Democrats had to drag it out to placate their union and progressive allies.

To quote the famous New Jersey philosopher and Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, Yogi Berra, the confirmation process for Trump’s Education Secretary-Designate Betsy DeVos was “… déjà vu all over again.” Like the Democratic and Republican senators voting on the 1991 confirmation of then U.S. Court of Appeals-D.C. Circuit Judge Clarence Thomas (who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush) for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, a deal was made to let vulnerable senators of both parties have the leeway to vote for or against Thomas. All they had to do was to come up with 51 votes, and the final tally was 52-48 to install him as an Associate Justice.

This time around, with the Republicans holding a 52-48 Senate majority, they had to rally their troops to get DeVos across the finish line. Her good friend, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), had to oppose her although he believes in school choice and vouchers as fervently as DeVos (she assisted him in his substantial chartering of the Newark, New Jersey Public Schools and his proposal for school vouchers during his term as the city’s mayor). Booker has received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from DeVos, her family, and her school choice cronies (e.g., the Koch Bros., Eli Broad, the Walton family, and a bevy of Wall Street financiers) since he first ran for office in 1998. He has served with DeVos on boards and committees of numerous school choice organizations (e.g., the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation for Children) since that time. She granted him permission to cast a vote against her confirmation since she understood that he could not stand with her because he had to maintain his political viability as he pursues a run for president in 2020. In exchange, Booker agreed to support DeVos’s school choice initiatives once she takes office, a wink and nod. (You may note that his January 18^th statement against DeVos was very mild in describing why he would not ratify her cabinet appointment.)

Sen. Booker found himself boxed in after Trump chose DeVos to head his Department of Education. He had received significant support from New Jersey’s teachers and from national teachers’ unions in his two campaigns for the U.S. Senate; they had launched major offensives to defeat DeVos. In addition, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing has viewed him as aligning with them on social issues and as a strong supporter of traditional public education. Moreover, the senior Democratic New Jersey U.S. Senator, Bob Menendez, came out early and strong in his denouncement of the DeVos selection also forcing Booker to follow suit.

Eli Broad, arguably one of the most prominent national advocates of corporate charter schools, sent a letter to the Senate that was antagonistic to Betsy DeVos’s confirmation, joining with teacher unions in asserting that she is a threat to public schools. A long-term billionaire member of the education reform Cartel where DeVos is his prominent colleague, Broad stuck a shiv in her back as she reached for her dream job (Et tu Eli). He views her ardent promotion of private school vouchers as a barrier to the development of his budding national corporate charter school empire and his efforts to pimp the teacher union lobby. Furthermore, private school vouchers have a smaller constituency than corporate charters which generate more profits because of their higher payout rate. As Michael Corleone’s Consigliere, Tom Hagen, told one of his Captains in the movie, Godfather I, as he was about to have him executed for betraying Michael, “Michael understands it was not personal, that it was business.” Eli Broad’s attempt to kill Betsy DeVos’s chance of becoming U.S. Secretary of Education was “just business.” Now that he has failed to stop her, they will make an arrangement to work together to continue privatizing public education as they have done in the past.

Public-sector unions and education stakeholders were also bamboozled by two Republican U.S. Senators, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), who dramatically announced on the floor of the Senate that they would not vote to confirm DeVos although both had earlier sustained her nomination in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, where she won a narrow 12-11 majority, with their two ballots, allowing it to go to the Senate floor. They then voted with the Republican majority procedurally to allow the Senate to confirm her. Thus, they had two opportunities to block her ascendancy to become U.S. Secretary of Education and refused to do so.

Sens. Murkowski’s and Collins’s casting of no votes in the final deliberations was a political sleight of hand. Yet, public education advocates congratulated them for taking this so-called principled stance, while ignoring the fact that either one of them could have blocked DeVos by voting NO against her nomination in Committee. Meanwhile, the HELP Committee chair, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), thanked his colleagues for permitting the DeVos appointment go forward for a final vote, another wink and nod.

In what some have termed an unprecedented move, Vice President Mike Pence came down to the Senate to cast the deciding vote in a 50-50 tie which had been planned all along to make it appear that DeVos was hanging by a thread. However, there are no precedents that govern the political behavior of President Trump, his presidential administration, or his strategies for the confirmation of his cabinet nominees. What we have here is a bipartisan group of U.S. senators who found ways to back DeVos’s appointment while condemning her candidacy publicly. None of the Republican senators who had been targeted for defection to provide the decisive third Republican no vote were ever in play. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate’s majority leader, was masterful in maintaining party discipline. Unions and Democrats could learn a lesson or two from this political tactician.

Meanwhile, President Trump will use DeVos’s victory to assail the Democrats for their intransigence against a warrior for low-income children and to have a badly needed touchdown celebration in the aftermath of his botched executive order on immigration. His plan is to soften them up so they can be steamrolled for the vote on his recently nominated Tenth Circuit federal appellate judge, Neil M. Gorsuch, for the Supreme Court.

In the interim, McConnell is developing a strategy to secure bipartisan backing for Judge Gorsuch. He has targeted eight of the Democratic Senators up for reelection in 2018 in ten states Trump won. Five of these states went to Trump in a landslide (Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia), and he won five narrowly (Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). McConnell believes he can carry the Democrats from the landslide states and flip three of the latter five with a massive deployment of boots on the ground to campaign against them, bringing his vote total to sixty so he can avoid a Democratic filibuster without having to resort to the nuclear option to get rid of it altogether.

Under our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, public education is liable to descend into the “… valley of the shadow of death,” and it is unlikely to emerge as the bulwark of our democracy that it was.