Betsy McCaughey

Elizabeth Helen McCaughey (born October 20, 1948 formerly known as Betsy McCaughey Ross), is an American politician who was the lieutenant governor of New York from 1995 to 1998, during the first term of Governor George Pataki.

She wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, won several fellowships, and received her BA, with distinction, in 1970.

McCaughey's father died in 1970 at the age of 60.

Her mother, an alcoholic, died the next year of liver disease at the age of 42.

McCaughey went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, earning her MA in 1972 and her PhD in constitutional history in 1976.

In 1972, she married Thomas K. McCaughey, a Yale College graduate she had met in college.

He was then moving up as an investment banker.

She won Columbia's Bancroft Dissertation Award in American History in 1976 and her dissertation was published by the prestigious Columbia University Press in 1980, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson.

McCaughey taught history as a visiting assistant professor at Vassar College in 1977–1978 and was a lecturer in 1979–1980.

She also contributed a chapter about Johnson to the 1979 book The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives by William M. Fowler and Wallace Coyle.

While completing her PhD, McCaughey trained in the corporate banking department at Chase Manhattan Bank, and she served as a loan officer in the Food, Beverage, and Tobacco Division.

She also took courses in accounting at Columbia's School of Business.

In the late 1980s, McCaughey briefly considered a career in TV news, but she opted instead for a position as a senior scholar at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, serving from 1989 to 1992.

There, she wrote an article, book reviews, and a guest editorial for its journal, Presidential Studies Quarterly (PSQ), and an op-ed in USA Today advocating reform of the Electoral College method of electing the president.

She was an assistant professor at between 1981 and 1983, teaching two classes per year, both at Columbia University Between 1983 and 1984, she had a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowship.

From 1986 to 1988, she served as a guest curator at the New-York Historical Society and was responsible for the museum's exhibit commemorating the bicentennial of the US Constitution.

She also authored a book, Government by Choice: Inventing the United States Constitution, which cataloged the exhibit.

The McCaugheys separated in 1992 and divorced in 1994, with McCaughey and her ex-spouse sharing joint custody of their three daughters.

She testified at a July 22, 1992, hearing before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and helped produce a report suggesting constitutional amendments to fix perceived flaws in the Electoral College.

McCaughey also wrote op-ed columns that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today in which she opposed plans involving local and state redistricting to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and she criticized federal court-ordered desegregation of schools in Connecticut and New Jersey.

She also supported the nomination of a federal judge, Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court by arguing that he would judge cases there on their merits and not tend to interpret cases in a manner consistent with his conservative beliefs; She also supported a tobacco company in litigation before the Supreme Court and praised the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey Supreme Court decision, restricting abortion rights.

Her 1993 attack on the Clinton healthcare plan was likely a major factor in the initially popular bill's defeat in Congress.

Also, it brought her to the attention of Republican Pataki, who chose her as his nominee/running mate.

In January 1993, she filed an affidavit in her divorce proceeding in which she said she had no annual earnings from employment during most of the 18 years of her marriage to Thomas, and she had never earned more than $20,000 per year except in 1990, when she "sold an idea to Fox television for a windfall once-in-a-lifetime sum of $75,000".

In February 1993, the John M. Olin Foundation funded a fellowship at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for McCaughey to write a book on race and the legal system to be titled Beyond Pluralism: Overcoming the Narcissism of Minor Differences.

From 1995 until their divorce in 2000, she was married to business magnate Wilbur Ross, who went on to serve as Secretary of Commerce during Donald Trump's presidency.

McCaughey and her twin brother, William, were born in Pittsburgh to Ramona Peterken, and her husband Albert, a factory janitor.

The family moved around the Northeastern United States for six years before it settled down in Westport, Connecticut, where McCaughey's father did maintenance and later engineering work at a nail clipper factory.

McCaughey recalled her parents' difficulty in affording medical treatment: "my brother was a serious asthmatic as a child. I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table wondering if they could afford to take [him] to the hospital."

She married wealthy investment banker and prominent Democratic Party fundraiser Wilbur Ross Jr. in December 1995.

She unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for governor after Pataki dropped her from his 1998 ticket, and she ended up on the ballot under the Liberal Party line.

He filed for divorce in November 1998.

She was a member of the boards of directors of medical equipment companies Genta (from 2001 to 2007) and Cantel Medical Corporation, but she resigned in 2009 to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest with her public advocacy against the Affordable Care Act.

In 2009, her criticisms of the Affordable Care Act, then a bill being debated in Congress again gained significant media attention in television and radio interviews, and it may have specifically inspired the "death panel" claim about the act.

She has been a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and Hudson Institute thinktanks and has written numerous articles and op-eds.

McCaughey attended public schools in Westport through the 10th grade, spending much of her free time at the library.

After receiving a scholarship, she transferred to a private Massachusetts boarding school, the Mary A. Burnham School, for her last two years of high school, rarely visiting home, then or during her college years.

She received a scholarship to attend Vassar College, where she majored in history.

In August 2016 the Donald Trump presidential campaign announced that she had joined the campaign as an economic adviser.

A historian by training, with a PhD from Columbia University, McCaughey has, over the years, provided conservative media commentary on US public policy affecting healthcare-related issues.