On the twitters, a lawyer said that his concern for due process caused him to be a liberal 30 years ago and a conservative today. These 19 Democrats in the Senate seem determined to prove him right when it comes to Title IX.

Changes to the School Grievance Process We appreciate that the proposed rule updates the requirements for schools’ grievance procedures addressing incidents of sexual violence to provide more flexibility for schools, allow processes that are not punitive and do not disincentive reporting, and include guardrails to ensure all students, including

complainants and respondents, have appropriate process protections. We appreciate that, consistent with other, similar types of complaints, the proposed rule requires schools to use the “preponderance of evidence standard” to evaluate Title IX claims unless the school uses the “clear and convincing evidence” standard for all other comparable investigations.

The opening sentences, tedious, vague and meaningless, might at first be thought to contribute nothing but the pointless murder of words, certainly nothing new to senators. But that would miss the real purpose of the first few lines of the paragraph, which is intended to cause eyes to glaze over, minds to dull, so no one see what comes at the end of the paragraph. This:

And we applaud the Department’s proposed rule for removing the DeVos rule’s requirement that colleges and universities have a live hearing with cross-examination for allegation of sexual harassment and have a separate decision maker. The harmful live hearing and cross-examination process, which is wholly unnecessary to determine what happened in a particular incident, re-traumatizes survivors who have already been abused, harassed, and discriminated against and unfairly provides an advantage to the more resourced party.

Determining disputed facts and credibility needs neither live hearing nor cross? Hearings are “harmful” because it “re-traumatizes survivors,” but for the fact that there is no basis to claim trauma in the first place (is there something traumatic about drunk consensual sex?) and, ironically for the senators, many of whom were “so-called” lawyers for at least a brief period of time, presuming the “survivors” to have “already been abused.” That’s the issue to be determined, senators. Or did you miss that day at law school?

But what of the accused? If the accusation is unchallengable, and the accuser is a survivor already abused, that would mean the accuser must be denied the presumption of…

In addition, we ask the Department to remove the presumption that the respondent is not
responsible for sex discrimination until a determination is made. This presumption is not required in any other type of school proceeding and perpetuates the harmful and false stereotypes that those who report sex-based harassment are being untruthful.

Putting aside that Title IX prohibits sex discrimination by the college, not the accused, which one might expect senators to realize, this should be a classic moment in senators saying mind-numbingly stupid shit. Ever case has a burden of proof, and every burden falls on the party making the accusation against the other party. The only people foolish enough to argue this means accusers are presumed “untruthful” are addle-brained 12-year-olds, dishonest activists and, now, 19 Democratic senators.

The balance of the letter is similarly nonsensical, but these two issues are more than adequate to make the point that when it comes to destroying the lives of innocent men to pander to fragile women, there are no depths to which these senators will not go.