Friday, September 08, 2017

The lawless left

Earlier this week, I commented on President Trump's decision to allow the program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to begin a six-month phase out.

While I believe America would be better off with the beneficiaries of that program (i.e. children of illegal aliens who know no other life but living in the USA) remaining here, drafting a directive to the Dept. of Homeland Security (as then President Obama did) are not how laws are created in this country. Nevertheless, Trump's decision threw leftists into a snit fit. Yes, they essentially labeled the President as an intolerant bigot and ruthless dictator for wanting to uphold the separation of powers doctrine by having Congress craft legislation.

And let's not forget the leftists' insistence that someone placed on an arbitrary watch list should be deprived of their second amendment rights despite not being found guilty of an actual crime. So much for due process, innocent until proven guilty, etc.

But the latest issue leaving proggies frothing was the decision of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to put an end to on-campus "Kangaroo Courts."

DeVos indicated that she intended to withdraw Obama administration “guidance” on adjudicating sexual-assault claims on campus and replace it with a regulatory rulemaking process that is intended to protect students from sexual assault and preserve essential civil liberties.

It’s hard to overstate the legal and moral necessity of this action. First, let’s deal with the law. In 2011, the Obama administration issued a now-infamous “Dear Colleague” letter that required universities to lower the burden of proof in sexual-assault adjudication to a “preponderance of the evidence” standard (50.1 percent probability) without also adequately preserving essential due-process rights such as access to counsel, access to available evidence, and full and fair cross-examination of witnesses. At the same time, the administration commenced dozens of open-ended investigations of universities — acting on claims that they were insufficiently committed to protecting women from rape and applying the new guidance to evaluate university policies.

These actions were fundamentally lawless. No American administration has the ability to rewrite the law by merely issuing a letter. At the very least, the Obama administration should have conducted a notice-and-comment regulatory rulemaking process in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act. Even then, the regulation would still have to be consistent with governing federal statutes and comply with the Constitution. But Obama’s Department of Education ignored these steps and instead violated the APA, Title IX, and the Constitution in an ideologically motivated trifecta of campus tyranny.

The web site Reason.com listed several cases where the ill-advised Obama administration policy was a hindrance, in large part because it deprived the accused and accusers the ability to retain legal counsel (again, so much for due process, eh?).

Why do "progressives" hate the Constitution?

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