The new proposed Title IX regulations have not as yet been released, but leaked to the Washington Post, and the battle has already been joined. While I refuse to address the regs until they are official, as we’ve already played this game with leaked regs at the New York Times, which didn’t pan out well, one aspect has already caused heads to burst.

A new rule from Betsy DeVos would require universities to allow accused sexual abusers to cross-examine and re-traumatize their victims. This is absolutely sickening.

But what would you expect of NARAL, right? Except that was just the start.

No survivor should be cross-examined by his or her accused rapist. Ever. Full stop.

And to make matters worse, it wasn’t just the panderers in Congress who hate the Constitution.

If @BetsyDeVosED and @realDonaldTrump actually cared about the well-being of survivors, this is the last thing they would do. We should be empowering survivors to speak up, not stifling them.

That’s Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, crying about “stifling survivors” by allowing the accused male students to cross-examine their accusers. But the problem gets worse: based upon the leaked regs, this isn’t an accurate complaint.

Rep. Kennedy and NARAL are lying about proposed Title IX rule change.

The proposed rule (as leaked) does *NOT* require universities to allow accused rapists to cross-examine their accuser. The rule *allows* cross-examination by an attorney with the accused in a different room.

More specifically, the leaked regs would permit an attorney or advisor for the accused to cross-examine the accuser, who could require the accused to be in a different room.

The most significant change would guarantee the accused the right to cross-examine their accusers, though that would have to be conducted by advisers or attorneys for the people involved, rather than by the person accused of misconduct. If requested, the parties could be in separate rooms during the cross-examination, an administration official said. They said this was done to bolster the due-process rights of the accused while assuring that victims are not directly confronted by their assailants.

Not only is the outrage based upon a lie, a facially false characterization of what the regs would permit assuming the leaked regs are accurately portrayed, perpetuated by activists and elected officials, but this has already moved the Overton Window on the propriety of due process for the accused far to the left.

And, btw, this procedure—allowing the accuser and the accused to be separated, but allowing examination of both parties—has been all but mandated by the courts.

It’s a due process issue, and one that requires sensitivity. Hence the reasonable separation of accuser and accused.

Because of the pressure to be sensitive to the “survivor,” people are falling all over themselves to appear Solomonic in their split-the-baby approach to due process and the disastrous handling of campus sex adjudications. Except this is all nonsense and doomed to fail miserably. It replaces one horrifically bad inquisitorial system with another that provides some of the trappings of due process to some students while others will continue to enjoy the railroad ride to destruction.

Had the Title IX adjudication process not begun with the unilateral fiat of two unelected bureaucrats, Russlyn Ali and Catherine Lhamon, at the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, manufacturing out of whole cloth a system to unlawfully (meaning in violation  of the Administrative Procedures Act by never putting their “rules” through the required “notice and comment” period required by law) impose their radical view of Title IX on colleges, we wouldn’t be in the position of having to deconstruct their inquisition.

Instead, they created the baseline, upon unlawful threat of federal defunding, system that was contrived for the specific purpose of assuring that every accuser would be coddled and every accused convicted. Now that it’s being dismantled, to some extent, the loss of these protections creates the appearance that “survivors” are being harmed, when the reality is that this was an outrageously unfair and unlawful inquisition in the first place.

But why is this purported change the point of attack at the moment? There is a belief that an accuser being in the same room as the accused would retraumatize her. That’s exactly the point under the Confrontation Clause, that if you’re going to falsely accuse someone, you should be compelled to do so under the innocent person’s stare. You should have to lie to the innocent accused’s face. You don’t get to hide behind rocks while lying about what some other person did. Plus, the student needs to be next to his advocate to assist in his own defense. You can’t do that from another room.

And what of Rep. Kennedy’s inane whine that no accused rapist should get to cross-examine the “survivor”? What happens to the student who can’t afford to retain counsel to defend him against false accusations? No, there will be no lawyer provided, so it’s up to him. If he can’t afford counsel, his “advisor” can do it for him, except non-lawyer advisors, whether “mom” or a French Lit prof, aren’t equipped to do cross as beyond their skillset, and lack the factual knowledge to make even a credible go at it.

If the accused student has no one competent to conduct his cross, he should have the right to act in his own defense, just as any pro se defendant has the right to cross-examine his accuser.

We’ve allowed the fetishization of female victimhood on campus to skew our grasp and expectation of basic rights of fairness to such an extent that even fundamental due process is spun as if it’s some outrageous attack on the victim. This is due process. The horror is that innocent accused will not be sacrificed for the campus narrative of believe the women and coddle them at all costs.

We don’t presume the accused guilty and deny them the opportunity to defend themselves. Ever. Full stop.