Another Biden Administration Attack on Americans’ Basic Rights

New Rules for Title IX

Does President Biden call the shots in the White House?  Many commentators don’t think so because he seems to be too physically and mentally impaired to keep up with the day-to-day stress of presidential decision-making, much less setting policy.  But who knows?

About one issue however - the administration’s latest scandale du jour - I think the President may be leading.  That issue is the recent changes the Department of Education has made to the rules governing Title IX prohibiting discrimination in education based on sex.  My conclusion stems from the fact that the new rules and the assumptions that underpin them bear a striking resemblance to those on domestic violence which was always Biden’s “signature” piece of legislation in the Senate.

What was for a couple of decades entitled the “Violence Against Women Act” included the sharp diminution of basic civil rights for those charged, plus a virulent misandry that assumed men charged with DV to be guilty until they could prove otherwise.  Until they did, they could find themselves jailed, removed from their homes, deprived of access to their children, forced to find a place to live, often out of a job and required to hire a lawyer to defend themselves.  All that could arise from nothing but the say-so of their wife/significant other.  Indeed, in 2009 I read the training materials in DV cases for police departments that instructed officers to assume male guilt and ignore even clear evidence of female perpetration.  That abandonment of basic probable cause was strongly influenced by federal funding for state and local law enforcement agencies that encouraged assumptions of male guilt and female innocence.

Such was Joe Biden’s impact on the issue of domestic violence – disdain for due process of law and the facts of individual cases when they conflicted with the ideology on DV.  In interviews, he made his agreement with that ideology entirely clear.  In not a single instance did he acknowledge even the possibility of perpetration by women or the victimization of men despite decades of research showing gender equality in both.

So, when the new Title IX rules were published in April, it was no surprise that the rights of college students accused of sexual misconduct (almost all of whom are men) had been cut to the bone and the same ideology regarding claims of sexual assault as those regarding DV warmly embraced.  Here’s a summary by veteran Title IX expert, K.C. Johnson:

Accused students will lose the right to have access to all evidence gathered in the university’s Title IX investigation;

They will lose the right to have a live hearing to adjudicate the claim against them;

They will no longer be able to have an adviser or attorney cross-examine adverse witnesses;

And the Biden administration has voided the basic requirement that any investigation open with a written complaint.

Worse, the charges will be issued, investigated, tried and decided by a single individual - a classic inquisition whose goal, like that of The Inquisition was to either find guilt or so intimidate the accused that he bowed to the dictates of authority regardless of how at odds with reason and simple justice.

In short, under the new rules, an accused student won’t be able to know the charges against him, won’t know the evidence, won’t have a hearing and won’t have an attorney or an adviser.  And his case will likely be decided by a college administrator who’s steeped in the woke ideology on sexual assault.  A kid, perhaps still in his teens, will be flying blind and the result of the hearing may mean the end of his ability to get a college education.  After all, if he’s expelled for sexual misconduct by one university, what other university will want him as a student? 

More amazingly still, the new rules come in a context of over 500 lawsuits against colleges and universities arising out of their denial of basic contractual and/or constitutional rights due to their adherence to the Title IX rules adopted during the Obama Administration that the new ones closely resemble.  You’d think they’d have learned, but apparently the Biden Administration cares as little about the financial well-being of colleges as it does about the basic rights of students.  The new rules would require those institutions to choose between paying out hefty civil damages for violating students’ basic rights and losing their federal funding.  They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Whoever is calling the shots, woke ideology trumps every other consideration.

Perhaps worse is that the new rules redefine the word “sex” in the Title IX statute to include “gender identity.”  That would have many consequences, but one of the most obvious is that colleges and universities will have to make all facilities, including athletic ones, and all competitive events available to trans students equally with non-trans ones, allowing biological males to share bathrooms, showers and locker rooms with women and compete against biological females, potentially leading to the end of women’s athletics.

Now, the good news is that few of the new rules, particularly the redefinition of “sex,” will pass legal muster.  Administrative agencies aren’t empowered to rewrite statutory law, only to provide rules for its implementation.  Congress didn’t protect “gender identity” by Title IX, so the Department of Education can’t either.  Attempting to do so is a matter of plain administrative overreach and soon enough will be found to be so.

Likewise, I suspect that the requirement that schools violate federal and state statutes, constitutional law and their contractual obligations to students won’t survive judicial scrutiny.  How can an administrative agency require a college, or anyone else, to commit an illegal act?

With the ink barely dry on the Biden Administration’s press release, an astonishing 15 states have already filed suit to enjoin enforcement of the new rules.  Other political entities and private organizations have also sued and six governors have ordered colleges and universities in their states to refuse compliance with same.  To say the least, that’s an impressive improvement over the response to the Obama rules issued in 2011 to cries of dismay, but little effective pushback.

Wokeism knows no bounds, particularly that of good sense, a fact the Biden Administration seems hell-bent on proving and re-proving daily.