George Will takes Rubio to task for supporting CASA
In George Will’s opinion Marco Rubio has a ‘recurring penchant for ill-considered undertakings. Stating that Rubio’s support of S-590, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, indicates a susceptibility to trendy temptations, carelessness regarding evidence, and indifference to constitutional values.
George Will goes on to write:
Wielding irrelevant laws, spurious social science and financial coercion, the Obama administration is pressuring colleges and universities to traduce standards of due process when dealing with students accused of sexual assault. Claiming that a 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education somehow empowers the government to dictate institutions’ disciplinary procedures, the administration is dictating that a mere “preponderance of the evidence,” rather than “clear and convincing” evidence, be used in determining a life-shattering verdict of guilt.
Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson — a lawyer and an academic, neither Republicans — write that the administration justifies this by citing a single “resoundingly discredited” study purporting to prove an epidemic (involving one in five women) of campus sexual assaults. The administration opposes allowing accused students to cross-examine their accusers, and favors a form of double jeopardy — allowing accusers to appeal not-guilty findings.
Rubio is one of 12 Republican senators collaborating with the administration by co-sponsoring legislation that would codify requiring improvised campus disciplinary proceedings to supplant law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Proposed by Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the legislation is, as Taylor and Johnson say, “designed to advance the administration’s agenda.” The legislation’s language radiates prejudgment: By repeatedly referring to accusers as “victims,” it presumes the guilt of the accused. Taylor and Johnson write:
“America’s universities are in the grip of a dangerous presume-guilt-and-rush-to-judgment culture. … An entire generation of college students is learning to disregard due process and the dispassionate evaluation of evidence. And dozens of clearly or at least probably innocent students, whose cases we will detail in a book we are now writing, have been branded sex criminals, been railroaded out of their universities, and seen their hopes and dreams ruined.”
By co-sponsoring S-590, Rubio is helping the administration sacrifice a core constitutional value, due process, in order to advance progressives’ cultural aggression. The next Republican president should be someone committed to promptly stopping this disgrace, not someone who would sign S-590’s affirmation of it.
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