Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania sponsored an amendment to the GOP tax bill that would exempt small Hillsdale College in Michigan from a tax that would apply to other colleges with a sizable endowment. This exemption is worth $700,000 a year to Hillsdale College.

Why did he care so much about a college that is not even in his home state?

Hillsdale is an unusual college. It is one of the very few in the nation that refuses any federal funds, even for student aid, so that it is exempt from any federal regulations, like civil rights.

It is also a special object of the affection of the DeVos family. The DeVos family gave Pat Toomey $60,000 in his close 2016 election. He won’t face the voters again until 2022. Hillsdale College is also a favorite of the Koch brothers, who also supported Toomey’s re-election campaign.

Columnist Will Bunch explains Toomey’s peculiar affection for a super-conservative college not in his own state:

If you’ve never heard of a small institution of higher learning called Hillsdale College, here are a few things you should know about it. The school decided after a 1980s Supreme Court ruling to forego all federal funds, which means it doesn’t need to follow the Title IX rules aimed at reducing campus sexual assault, let alone any guidelines on affirmative action. The college is thus mostly white — and its longtime president once referred to non-white students at a legislative hearing as “dark ones.” It also has a reputation as an unfriendly place for LGBTQ students — which was driven home when the school’s chaplain called for prayer against “evil” gay marriage.

And there’s also this: Hillsdale College is located in southern Michigan, some 280 miles west of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

All in all, to paraphrase the cliché of the moment, this was a bizarre Hillsdale that one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators, Pat Toomey, chose to die on.

OK, maybe “die” isn’t the right word, but the state’s junior senator did reveal a lot about himself on the wee wee hours on Friday when — in a strange 11-minute debate amid the dead-of-night push for the GOP’s $1 trillion millionaire tax giveaway — Toomey tried to defend his amendment that would mean a $700,000 annual tax break for the conservative-oriented Hillsdale by exempting it from a levy on endowments that would hammer the University of Pennsylvania and several other schools in the state Toomey supposedly represents.

Thanks to a few wayward Republicans, the special carveout for Hillsdale College was deleted, but later recouped by adding a few more colleges to the mix:

And it was all for a murky outcome — Toomey’s amendment was voted down (even some of his fellow Republicans thought this a bridge too far), although a later, broader amendment removed not just Hillsdale but also many more traditional universities from the endowment tax.

The universities and colleges that will pay a tax on their endowments will have less money for scholarships for needy students. But that is of no concern to Pat Toomey, or Betsy DeVos, or the Koch brothers.