Five hundred thousand dollars wasn’t enough, so the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors upped the ante to a cool mil. Not for new school books. Not for free lunches for hungry kids. Not to add more teachers. They had a far more important need at stake.

Dauber told the board the audit is “urgent.”

“Students are returning to campus now, and when they do, the epidemic of sexual violence will return with them,” Dauber said.

Yes, an audit. And yes, by none other than the crazed screamer of Stanford Law School, Michele Dauber. But was she to audit the “epidemic of sexual violence” that the unduly passionate imagine is happening? No, no. Dauber needs this money urgently to audit compliance with the law. Or to be more precise, to do everything possible to prevent compliance with the law.

The audits are intended to discover if any schools, including Stanford, have altered their policies after U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos changed Title IX policy nationally to give the accused more due process rights and narrow the scope of cases educators must investigate.

Dauber’s on the job to “discover” if schools are complying with the law by giving the accused, dare I even utter the words, due process. This is, to some extent, required by the new Title IX regs, against which there have been numerous suits brought to challenge, including suit by the ACLU, all of which have been summarily rejected. To add insult to injury, more than 170 federal court decisions have issued concluding that the bureaucratically-imposed “Dear Colleague Letter” under which Title IX enforcement was unlawfully imposed were unconstitutional denials of due process.

The law. From courts, from the Department of Education under the Administrative Procedures Act, from the Constitution. And Dauber is getting $1,000,000 to audit schools to make sure they’re violating it.

Supervisor Dave Cortese on Tuesday (Oct. 20) brought a $500,000 request for Title IX compliance auditing through countywide schools — including K-12 and post-secondary schools, and private institutions such as Stanford — to the board for approval.

“The Trump administration gutted protections in Title IX and increased the likelihood that sexual assaults and harassment will occur, and watered down the responses that administrators at schools and universities should take,” said Cortese, who is running in the November election for the state Senate against former Santa Clara County Counsel Ann Ravel. “This review is needed now more than ever.”

Supervisor Joe Simitian of Palo Alto seconded the motion for the program and asked for an additional $500,000 in funding, which was approved unanimously.

“I just don’t think that the work can be thoughtfully and thoroughly done at half a million dollars and I’d like us to start with that understanding,” Simitian said.

Picture Dauber, foul-mouthed and wild-eyed, roaming from school to school, demanding to know how many male students were summarily expelled based on believing the women, her eyes flashing with outrage upon learning that some guy was allowed to prove the accusations were a lie and wasn’t immediately defenestrated.

For some reason, I could see her doing this for free. Heck, I could see her paying for the privilege. But no, she’s managed to finagle the County Board of Supervisors to not only pay someone to make sure that the law is being violated, but then to double the vig so breaking the law, violating the Constitution, can be done “thoughtfully and thoroughly.” Half a million just isn’t enough to guarantee that no male student be afforded his constitutional rights.

Be fair. It’s a heck of a gig for Dauber, to be paid, and paid well, to assure the people of Santa Clara County that no schoolboy will be afforded due process. As grifts go, this one is brilliant, and Dauber managed to pull it off.