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WHY WON’T THE DEMOCRATS STOP THEIR FILIBUSTER? WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA? U.S. Funding for Fighting Zika Virus Is Nearly Spent, C.D.C. Says.

Flashback: The Hill: Senate Democrats block Zika agreement ahead of recess.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a deal providing funding for the fight against the Zika virus, virtually guaranteeing that Congress won’t get legislation to President Obama’s desk this month.

In a 52-48 vote, the Senate fell eight votes short of moving past a procedural hurdle against the House-Senate conference report on a military and veterans spending bill, which includes $1.1 billion to fund the Zika virus research.

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) broke with his party and backed moving forward with the deal. GOP Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against the Zika deal. McConnell’s “no” vote allows him to bring the measure back up for another vote.

The vote leaves the current fight over the Zika virus at a standstill with days left before the July 4th recess.

The Dem line now is that the GOP is holding things up — by not doing what the Dem minority wants. It never goes that way when the parties are reversed. . . .

FLASHBACK: The Hill: Senate Democrats block Zika agreement ahead of recess.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a deal providing funding for the fight against the Zika virus, virtually guaranteeing that Congress won’t get legislation to President Obama’s desk this month.

In a 52-48 vote, the Senate fell eight votes short of moving past a procedural hurdle against the House-Senate conference report on a military and veterans spending bill, which includes $1.1 billion to fund the Zika virus research.

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) broke with his party and backed moving forward with the deal. GOP Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against the Zika deal. McConnell’s “no” vote allows him to bring the measure back up for another vote.

The vote leaves the current fight over the Zika virus at a standstill with days left before the July 4th recess.

The Dem line now is that the GOP is holding things up — by not doing what the Dem minority wants. It never goes that way when the parties are reversed. . . .

AN EASY CHANCE FOR THE GOP CONGRESS TO PROVE ITSELF: Senators want more money for campus sex police.

Several Democratic senators are requesting additional funds for the Education Department to continue policing the sex lives of college students.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Kaine, Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner have written a letter calling for increased funding for the Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which has been investigating schools for alleged violations of the anti-sex discrimination law known as Title IX. The senators are requesting a budget of $137.7 million for OCR. Last year, the office’s budget was $100 million, which means the senators are asking for a nearly 40 percent increase in funding for this one department.

Here’s how we got to this point, put as simply as possible: In 2011, OCR sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter that vastly expanded the definition of Title IX and what schools needed to do in order to comply with the statute. Because of the broadening of the statute, schools have been accused of violating students’ rights under Title IX and have come under investigation by OCR. Now OCR is requesting more money to investigate these schools because it has become overwhelmed.

The “Dear Colleague” letter sent by OCR in 2011 did not go through the required notice-and-comment period that past letters had gone through. This prompted Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., to demand that OCR justify its overreach. OCR failed to do so to Lankford’s liking. . . .

Also, just one Republican — Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada — signed onto the letter requesting an increase of funding for OCR. Republicans have so far, in very limited numbers, been the only ones standing up for the due process rights of students accused of crimes on college campuses.

So there’s an opportunity for others. Unless they’re stupid.

ASHE SCHOW: Education Dept. tries and fails to justify Title IX overreach.

Earlier this year Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., sent a letter to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights demanding justification for the department’s overreach on college campuses.

In the letter, Lankford notes that OCR “guidance” from 2011 — which prompted colleges and universities to begin forcefully pursuing accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault — never went through a notice-and-comment period yet imposed harsh financial penalties on schools that did not comply. This guidance document has led to more than 100 expelled accused students suing their universities for discrimination and due process violations, and many, many more expelled students who cannot afford to sue.

OCR missed the initial deadline Lankford set for a response, and requested an extension. When OCR finally did come up with an explanation for how forcing schools to drop the presumption of innocence or face funding cuts was legal, it was unsurprisingly underwhelming.

Catherine Lhamon, OCR’s assistant secretary for civil rights, spent several pages recounting earlier guidance documents that had gone through the notice-and-comment period as justification for the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter. But the 2011 letter included noticeable changes that vastly expanded OCR’s authority while sending a clear message to schools that if they don’t begin holding accused students accountable (which has come to mean, in practical terms, suspend or expel anyone accused) they will lose federal funding. These changes did not go through the notice-and-comment period.

As Lankford pointed out in his initial letter, it seemed like OCR deliberately tried to avoid the notice-and-comment period in the 2011 Dear Colleague letter because it was afraid “education officials and other interested groups would have voiced substantive objections to the letters’ policies if given an opportunity.”

The avoidance question still stands in OCR’s response to Lankford.

They didn’t want it to come up as a public issue before the 2012 election.

A judge says a former Brown University student can sue the Ivy league school over claims that he was wrongly accused of sexual misconduct and suspended for 2 ½ years.

The former student filed the lawsuit anonymously as “John Doe.” He says Brown’s disciplinary process is stacked against men accused of sexual misconduct.

The encounter for which he was suspended happened in 2014.

U.S. District Judge William Smith on Monday said gender discrimination, breach of contract and other claims can go forward.

Here’s the full opinion.

ABOUT TIME: GOP Senators Push Back on Campus PC.

A growing number of GOP lawmakers are expressing alarm about the Department of Education’s actions, cheered by the campus left, to curtail free speech and due process for college students. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the DOE is fielding tough questions from Kansas Sen. James Lankford about its order that colleges adopt a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in adjudicating sexual assault, and about its expansion of the definition of sexual harassment to include what many experts say is constitutionally protected speech. . . .

Lankford and Alexander aren’t even the two most well-known GOP lawmakers to clash with the Obama Administration on campus civil liberties: In 2013, Sen. John McCain sent a letter to Eric Holder arguing that the Administration’s “suggested disciplinary procedures are direct hindrances to students’ and teachers’ First Amendment rights,” and questioning whether it had the authority to impose them. (The Administration later backed off from the regulations at issue in that particular case).
We are glad to see that Congress is asserting is oversight powers in this way: Under President Obama, the heavily ideological Office for Civil Rights in Education has effectively gone rogue, unilaterally forcing hundreds of colleges to rewrite their rules of conduct while mostly avoiding accountability.

Still, Congress needs to do more. So far, the fierce debate over campus civil liberties has been handled almost entirely by the executive (which has almost always sided with the campus left) and the courts (which are modestly pushing back, at least at the state level). Congress must take a larger role in resolving these questions, and in particular, clarifying its expectations of both campuses and administrative agencies. While this may be a polarizing issue, its likely that at least some Democratic lawmakers would be unwilling to support the more radical initiatives of the Department of Education bureaucrats. After all, President Obama has himself spoken up for campus free speech, and even Sen. Bernie Sanders has suggested that progressives are approaching the sexual assault issue the wrong way.

Also, the GOP could do worse than to attack the “war on women” schtick by pointing out the very real war on college men.

OUR LAWLESS GOVERNMENT: Education Dept. fails to respond on time to senator’s overreach inquiry. “The Education Department has failed to respond to a request from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., regarding the Department’s authority to regulate bullying, harassment and sexual violence. In January, Lankford sent the Department a letter requesting it to name the specific law or regulation that gave it the authority to begin forcing schools to adjudicate such misconduct. Lankford gave the Department 28 days to respond, which would have been Thursday. Instead, the Department requested more time.”

Shouldn’t they know the legal basis for exerting their authority before they do so? Well, only in a lawful government, which this is not.

ASHE SCHOW: Oklahoma newspaper questions campus sexual assault policies.

Oklahoma’s largest daily newspaper, The Oklahoman, has published an editorial about the current federal policies surrounding campus sexual assault.

The editorial board, like others across the country, has noticed that the current policies being pushed on colleges to address campus sexual assault have led to major due process violations. The Oklahoman editorial board called the policies, which prioritizes finding accused students responsible over the truth, a “constitutionally dubious regime.” . . .

In one example highlighted by Lankford and The Oklahoman, Tufts University entered a voluntary agreement with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to change its policies without admitting guilty. OCR then told the school it would retroactively find them in violation of Title IX. Tufts, naturally, withdrew from the original agreement and was threatened with a loss of its federal funding.

“In short, even if schools implement show trials for sexual harassment complaints, they can still get dinged for insufficient zeal,” wrote The Oklahoman.

The editorial board concluded that the school needs to be able to differentiate policies for dealing with “crass and boorish — but not illegal — behavior” and illegal behavior. Because right now, when there are accusations that both students involved were intoxicated, one student (usually the male) is typically labeled a rapist without being given the tools to defend himself. This will have far reaching consequences for schools and the general public.

Those consequences include a drop in male enrollment, distrust between the sexes, perhaps more men accusing women of rape to protect themselves at the outset after a drunken hookup or perhaps an attitude that due process rights truly are an impediment to justice and must be removed from the actual legal system.

Meanwhile, colleges wonder why male enrollment is dropping.

MARCO RUBIO SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS, INSTEAD OF SIDING WITH GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION: Republican senator stands up to Ed. Dept. overreach.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., has written a letter to the secretary of the Education Department decrying the department’s federal overreach when it comes to bullying, harassment and sexual violence.

Lankford, who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, has taken specific issue with the Education Department’s rules regarding how schools adjudicate these issues. The department has issued multiple “Dear Colleague” letters imposing new rules, and with that, costs, on schools across the country without congressional approval or even a comment period.

The letters are subject to the Administrative Procedure Act, Lankford explains, because they amount to “substantive and binding regulatory policies that are effectively regulations.” Lankford asks for a “thorough justification of the letters by providing the precise statutory and/or regulatory authority under Title IX for each policy that the letters purport to interpret.”

Previously, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has cited Title IX as justification for forcing schools to adjudicate felonies such as sexual assault. Yet that is a very stretched interpretation of Title IX, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex. OCR has determined on its own that sexual harassment and sexual assault (even between same-sex partners) is a form of discrimination and therefore is covered under Title IX.

Even with that interpretation, nothing suggests that schools must set up kangaroo court systems to adjudicate accusations — that was yet another “interpretation” from OCR.