SEPTEMBER 15, 2017, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
DeVos and campus sexual assault
By DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
Education Secretary Betsy De-
Vos talked to lots of people—victims,
students who said they were falsely
accused and the family members of
both —before she started to reform
a policy instituted under President
Barack Obama that instructs college
campuses on how to deal with allega-
tions of sexual assault.
In the not so distant
past, university admin-
istrators often failed to
protect female students
or establish a culture
that discouraged aggres-
sive predatory behavior.
In such an atmosphere,
victims of sexual assault
had good reason to fear
reporting crimes committed against
them lest they be subjected to an on-
slaught of questions that looked for
fault in their behavior, instead of that
of their attackers.
With the rise of feminism, the par-
adigm shifted. Authorities generally
stopped looking for excuses to explain
away violent or abusive acts. In the
criminal justice system, the word was
out—don’t blame the victim.
And then, as happens, the move-
ment to stand up for victims morphed
into something different. In 2011, the
Offi ce of Civil Rights for the Educa-
tion Department sent a “Dear Col-
league” letter to colleges with new
guidelines for handling sexual assault
cases. The letter threatened to with-
hold funds from institutions that did
not adhere to the new policy, which
requires schools to investigate all
complaints of sexual assault and details
how they must conduct disciplinary
proceedings.
Desperate not to appear insensitive
to victims of sexual assault, academia
went overboard. The burden shifted
from the accuser to the accused. The
horror stories made news. Male stu-
dents charged with assault were pre-
sumed guilty. Tribunals had the ability
to expel students who were denied
due process.
In The Atlantic, Emily Yoffe wrote
about a University of Massachusetts,
Amherst junior who was accused of
sexual assault in 2014. His accuser
wrote that the two students had got-
ten high together, then engaged in
foreplay. She decided to leave. Later
she wrote, “as my RA (resident ad-
viser) training kicked in, I realized I’d
been sexually assaulted.”
Police investigated the case and
never charged Kwado Bonsu. But the
university restricted Bonsu’s move-
ment on campus, while investigating
him. Yoffe wrote that the university
found Bonsu was not responsible for
sexual misconduct, but suspended him
for not adhering to its restrictions.
Bonsu sued and his case was settled
confi dentially.
“Defi nitions of sexual wrongdoing
on college campuses are now seriously
over-broad,” four Harvard law profes-
sors wrote in an August paper, Fair-
ness to All Students under Title IX, that
challenged the Obama policy. “They
go way beyond accepted legal defi ni-
tions of rape, sexual assault, and sexual
harassment. They often include sexual
conduct that is merely unwelcome,
even if it does not create a hostile en-
vironment, even if the person accused
had no way of knowing it was un-
wanted, and even if the accuser’s sense
that it was unwelcome arose after the
encounter. The defi nitions often in-
clude mere speech about sexual mat-
ters.”
The Harvard law profes-
sors noted, “The procedures
for enforcing these defi ni-
tions are frequently so un-
fair as to be truly shocking.
Some colleges and universi-
ties fail even to give students
the complaint against them,
or notice of the factual ba-
sis of charges, the evidence
gathered, or the identities of witness-
es.”
Their decision to release this memo,
said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at
the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute,
sends the message that if you want to
defend the policy, “you’re not going
to have to argue with Libertarians and
conservatives” only, you are going to
have to argue with left-leaning legal
scholars who also care about fairness
and due process.
That makes it harder to push the
notion that if you are truly outraged
about rape, you are willing to go over-
board.
That’s the tack former Vice Presi-
dent Joe Biden took when he wrote
on Facebook, “Sexual assault is the
ultimate abuse of power, and its perni-
cious presence in our schools is unac-
ceptable. Policies that do not treat this
epidemic with the utmost seriousness
are an insult to the lives it has damaged
and the survivors who have worked so
hard to make positive change.”
Biden urged like-minded indi-
viduals to “speak up. Any rollback of
Title IX protections will hurt your
classmates, your students, your friends,
your sisters. Make your views known.”
There are many reasons DeVos
could have decided to let the current
policy continue.
The White House released a state-
ment that applauded DeVos’ deci-
sion “to overhaul the Department
of Education’s approach to campus
sexual assault enforcement under Title
IX. These efforts will produce better
policy—one that ensures that sexual
assault is taken seriously on campuses
without denying the accused the fun-
damental protections of due process.”
DeVos didn’t detail how the rules
will change but she said her offi ce
will seek feedback from the public
and universities to develop new rules,
a decision the White House also ap-
plauded.
“So much momentum has built up
for federally driven changes in campus
discipline and rules, so much momen-
tum for unreasonableness,” Olson said,
but the unfairness was so striking that
it brought together feminists, Liber-
tarians and Trump supporters.
Still, he added, “It took a great deal
of courage for her to do this. It would
have been easy for her to fi nd some
way to dodge it, or postpone it.”
Keizer’s 9/11
memorial
pipe band, prayer, short
respectful speeches and
even a breakfast after the
ceremony. It is a very
professional and mov-
ing event to remember
that day and the sacrifi ces
made. We are very fortu-
nate to have such a patriotic fi re dis-
trict and city.
It moves me every year I attend
and it makes me proud to live in
Keizer. Thank you, Keizer Fire Dis-
trict for all that you do for our com-
munity.
John P. Rizzo,
Keizer
guest
opinion
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By MICHAEL GERSON
“The last temptation is the great-
est treason: To do the right deed for the
wrong reason.”
—
T.S. Eliot
We have every reason to assume
the worst when it comes
to President Trump’s
motivation in rescinding
DACA—the program al-
lowing
undocumented
immigrants to live and
work openly if they came
to the United States as
children. Trump’s pub-
lic justifi cation is that President
Obama’s creation of DACA by ex-
ecutive action was unconstitutional.
A usurpation of Congress. A process
violation.
Yet Trump didn’t give a fi g for
constitutional niceties in his initial
order to keep people from certain
Muslim-majority countries out of
the U.S. Now, to potentially send
Hispanics out of the country, he has
discovered an appreciation for pro-
cess and precedent. There is a theme
here, and it is not respect for the
rule of law. Trump does not deserve
the benefi t of the doubt when it
comes to issues of race and ethnicity.
Recently, and with increasing fre-
quency, he has displayed malevolent
prejudice for political reasons. His
action on DACA is another install-
ment in this disturbing series.
But, apart from Trump’s moti-
vations, was his action on DACA
the right deed? Not, certainly, by
the measure of its outcome. Trump
has removed reasonable protec-
tions from a sympathetic group. It
would be a grave injustice to send
the Dreamers “home” to countries
where many have hardly visited.
A democracy, however, consid-
ers more than outcomes, or else the
American system of government
would be the Chinese system of
government. And the constitutional
case concerning DACA is not obvi-
ous.
The legal matter at issue: Does
the executive branch
have enough discre-
tion and authority to
interpret immigration
laws in the manner set
out by Obama—essen-
tially as a new pseudo-
program that grants
benefi ts to a group that
Congress did not mark out for ben-
efi ts? The courts have granted broad
discretion to immigration offi cials
in determining who to deport and
who not to deport. The fact that the
law is not applied equally in every
case does not invalidate the just ap-
plication of the law in any case. But
the further question is: Can that dis-
cretion be applied to an entire class
of undocumented people who are
then granted a package of benefi ts
(including work permits, advance
parole to travel in and out of the
country and, eventually, Social Se-
curity and Medicare)?
For most of his presidency, Obama
maintained that creating such a pro-
gram by executive action would be
improper overreach. In 2012, out of
frustration with congressional inac-
tion, he changed course and created
DACA. At the time, Obama frankly
admitted that this was a substitute
for legislation—a measure taken in
“the absence of any immigration
action from Congress.”
There is little question that the
president can prioritize immigra-
tion enforcement in a variety of
ways, say, to focus on deporting con-
victed felons rather than Dreamers.
other
views
This is the manner in which the
law was generally enforced before
DACA, and in which it could still
be enforced without DACA.
At some point, however, the sys-
tematic organization of this discre-
tion into a new legal status, bringing
a series of public benefi ts, becomes
the equivalent of legislating. And the
courts might focus particular scruti-
ny on forms of executive action that
Congress could have legislated but
didn’t. Given the more conservative
composition of the Supreme Court,
it is likely that DACA would have
been struck down.
Whatever the merits of the
constitutional case on DACA, the
Dreamers should now be protected
by law. For the last few decades,
Congress has pliantly surrendered
a number of roles—particularly on
social policy and national securi-
ty—to the courts and the president.
A shortage of institutional ambition
is a problem that America’s founders
did not even contemplate. This is an
opportunity for Congress to reclaim
its proper constitutional role.
This is also a debate, given that
few Republicans actually want to
deport the Dreamers, and most
Democrats seem to prioritize their
welfare, on which compromise
is particularly ripe. The obvious
deal: stronger border enforcement
(though not the surpassingly silly
wall) for a new version of DACA.
If Republicans can’t accept such
a deal, they have no heart and a
severely limited political future in
an increasingly diverse country. If
Democrats can’t accept such a deal,
their rhetoric on the Dreamers is
empty. On this issue, compromise
is now the evidence of compassion.
(Washington
Group)
Post
Writers
(Creator Syndicate)
letters
To the Editor:
The Keizer Fire Dis-
trict has provided a com-
munity memorial for the
9/11/2001 attack for the
last sixteen years. It is a very respect-
ful and sober event to remember
those who died and the emergency
responders who served. Through the
fi re district, the city of Keizer dem-
onstrates its community patriotism
for America and our citizens.
The Keizer Fire District hosts the
event, providing a fl ag ceremony, bag
The Dreamers deserve compassion
twitter.com/keizertimes
Don’t like DACA? Let Congress fi x it
By GENE H. McINTYRE
Humanitarians are people who
are concerned about, and seek to,
protect their fellow human beings.
They are also found to be kind
and thoughtful about the welfare
of most living creatures. They are
those Americans among us who
view Deferred Action for Child-
hood Arrivals (DACA) from an
emotional position, see-
ing it as a humane way
to treat those who en-
tered the U.S. through
no choice of their own.
DACA is an Ameri-
can immigration policy
that allows certain un-
documented
immi-
grants who entered the
U.S. before their 16th birthday and
before June, 2007, to receive a re-
newable two-year work permit and
exemption from deportation. It
does confer non-immigrant status
but not a path to citizenship.
Meanwhile, we Americans hard-
ly got to direct our attention to the
divisive expressions of racism and
hate at Charlottesville when two
weeks later we’ve got DACA. How-
ever, while Charlottesville had only
one side wrong, as much as evil is
never right, DACA, it’s argued, has
two legitimates, that is, the humane
angle and the law and order angle.
In the fi rst instance, with DACA,
there’s a case to be made that for-
mer President Barack Obama used
DACA as an executive order in
2012 for political gain and has used
his legal jargon knowledge to de-
fend it. By Obama’s own standards,
DACA does not stand the test of le-
gal scrutiny. The U.S. Constitution
plainly gives the role of lawmaker
to Congress while the executive
branch enforces the law.
DACA defers deportation and
provides work permits, Social Se-
curity cards, and a driver’s license to
over one million illegal immigrants
who arrived as minors while, from
the beginning, has been controver-
sial due to its dubious legal origins;
therein lies the rub with
DACA. Those protest-
ing its rescind want us
to believe this is a simple
question of the heart, of
kindness, of just another
chapter in the American
immigration story. Yet, at
it core, DACA is a ques-
tion of legality, that is
this: Is it legal for a president to cre-
ate legislative authority out of thin
air, deciding what preferences to
enforce?
All presidents try end runs and
this was Obama’s end run. How-
ever, it’s an extreme action by the
executive branch that underscores
the broken state of our immigra-
tion system. The 11 million immi-
grants living illegally here is due in
part at least to a system that requires
long wait times, imposes ancient
and possibly irrelevant quotas and
often gets those, trying to negotiate
it, into a morass of subjective deci-
sion making.
Those who want to crawl
out from under the moun-
tain of emotions now being un-
leashed throughout our land should
recognize that the current system
needs to be remedied and stand
down to redirect their efforts to
the U.S. Congress. The question
guest
column
of immigration, especially when it
involves children, is always packed
with emotion. Yet, intense emotion
should not overrule the law itself.
In keeping with his reputation
for self-serving ventures that are
profi t motivated, President Trump
just may be onto something worthy
of consideration. He is consistently
guilty of what’s judged hypocritical
by his own executive orders; nev-
ertheless, in this case, sending the
matter of DACA to the U.S. Con-
gress may be the only way the 11
million undocumented immigrants
will ever come to a place where
lasting peace-of-mind and law-
providing safety can be realized by
them.
Personal satisfactions may be de-
rived from marching in America’s
streets and byways while calling
out and carrying signs convey-
ing messages about what’s wanted.
In our country today, unfortu-
nately, the way to get a law on the
books is what U.S, corporations
and America’s wealthy do: they hire
lobbyists and send them to D.C.
with bags of money.
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)
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