What’s wrong with free speech? What’s wrong with due process of law? Those are fair questions for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., who has questioned the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be education secretary because she and her husband have given $10,000 to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (Disclosure: I’ve contributed to FIRE, in smaller amounts) Casey charged that FIRE seeks to make it “more difficult for campus sexual assault victims to receive justice.” That’s a reference to the “guidance” delivered by the Obama Education Department in 2011 which, as my then-Washington Examiner colleague Ashe Schow had written, “broadened the definition of harassment, required schools to use a lower standard of proof when determining the credibility of sexual assault accusations and backed it all up with the threat of investigations and a loss of federal funding. It placed a significant burden on schools to use their funds to set up pseudo-court systems to try accused students (and find them responsible or else face an investigation).”

This guidance was based on a fraudulent study which claimed, preposterously, that one in four college women is sexually assaulted, and the kangaroo courts set up do not give accused students rights to legal representation, knowledge of the charges against them or confrontation of witnesses. They specifically rule out requiring, as criminal trials for sexual assault do, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but only a preponderance of evidence. Schow has relentlessly documented the work of these kangaroo courts — and the lawsuits that aggrieved students have brought against the colleges and universities involved.