The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is deeply unpopular among backers of due process in campus rape proceedings, First Amendment advocates and promoters of race-neutral discipline in schools – but not in Congress.
The Education Department component gets $107 million in the 2016 omnibus bill (page 977) set to go before the full House tomorrow. That’s up from $100 million in last year’s omnibus bill – an increase of 7 percent.
Retired attorney Paul Mirengoff at Powerline explains why this is so troubling, especially coming from Republican lawmakers:
This outfit [OCR] does all it can to impose the left’s agenda at the K-12 and college levels. In doing so, it often ignores the law, defining perfectly legal conduct as unlawful.
If the OCR’s resources are stretched thin, it’s because of its overreach, based on a willful misreading of the law. By increasing OCR’s budget, Congress rewards its misconduct. The budget should be slashed, not increased.
He says OCR
puts K-12 schools in “legal jeopardy if they discipline black students more often in percentage terms” than whites, by applying a “disparate impact” standard with no basis in law
contradicts Supreme Court precedent on the threshold at which bullying becomes “a federal case”
forces colleges to lower their burden of proof in rape cases, “strongly discourages” cross-examination of accusers, and turns “dirty jokes” and even truthful claims about sexual history into sexual harassment for federal purposes
Mirengoff concludes: “Why is a Republican Congress about to reward OCR for abridging constitutional rights[?]”
Read the spending bill (Department of Ed is pages 954-983) and Powerline post.
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
IMAGE: Shutterstock
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.