Coyote Blog

Glenn Reynolds points to this story about Senator James Lankford challenging the Department of Education's "Dear Colleague" letters under the Administrative Procedures Act.  Lankford argues that the letters, which essentially end due process on campus for men accused of any sort of sexual misconduct from telling dirty jokes to rape in the name of Title IX enforcement, represent a new regulation that should have been subject to official publication and public comment.

Instapundit says that Marco Rubio should have done this, rather than taking the DEA's side.  Fair enough, but I have what I think is a better question -- why has not one single major university President brought a legal challenge against these letters?  Many of them complain, at least in private, and the letters certainly appear to me to be an illegal overreach.  But they all just rolled over and accepted it -- college Presidents all have become total lapdogs of the state.  They tend to preen that they and their universities are "leaders", but I would argue that they are leaders only in the sense that a random guy standing on a boxcar of a moving train and pointing forward is the leader of the train.

You want leadership?  Show me the first college President that formally rewrites their admission process to say "a minimum entry requirement will be the ability to maturely listen and respond to differing opinions without needing to crawl into and hide in a room full of stuffed animals and coloring books."

Postscript:  From Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr

"People have some very odd illusions about power.  Mostly it consists of finding a parade and nipping over to place yourself at the head of the band.  Just as eloquence consists of persuading people of things they desperately want to believe.  Demagoguery, I suppose, is eloquence sliding to some least-moral energy point.... Pushing people uphill is one hell of a lot harder.  You can break your heart, trying that."

It is weird to say that Bujold gets underrated, given all her awards, but I think she does -- in large part because her books are fun and enjoyable to read rather than gravid and soul-sucking, as seems to be the current SF fashion.

Given recent legislative and judicial decisions, there are vanishingly few electronic records that the government cannot rape at will.  Increasingly, government agencies can access electronic data without even bothering with silly stuff like warrants or judicial review.  

The Drug Enforcement Administration is trying to access private prescription records of patients in Oregon without a warrant, despite a state law forbidding it from doing so. The ACLU and its Oregon affiliate are challenging this practice in a new  that raises the question of whether the Fourth Amendment allows federal law enforcement agents to obtain confidential prescription records without a judge’s prior approval. It should not.

In 2009, the Oregon legislature created the Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), which tracks prescriptions for certain drugs dispensed by Oregon pharmacies, including all of the medications listed above. The program was intended to help physicians prevent drug overdoses by their patients and more easily recognize signs of drug abuse. Because the medical information revealed by these prescription records is highly sensitive, the legislature created robust privacy and security protections for the PDMP, including a requirement that law enforcement must obtain a warrant before requesting records for use in an investigation. But despite those protections, the DEA has been requesting prescription records from the PDMP using administrative subpoenas which, unlike warrants, do not involve demonstrating probable cause to a neutral judge.

While the government needs a search warrant to access paper medical records, it apparently feels it can look at electronic records without a warrant,.  Which explains one reason why the Administration is so excited about the new medical records requirements in Obamacare.   You didn't think HIPAA applied to the government, did you?  And if you wondered why Obamacare requires doctors to ask medically-unrelated questions (e.g. on gun ownership), now you know.