This Biden Pick Is Pure Culture Warrior

LAST week, the Senate Education Committee held a confirmation hearing for the woman who has done more than any other government official to fan the flames of our culture war: Catherine Lhamon. President Biden has nominated her to return for a second stint as assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. During her previous term, in the Obama administration, Lhamon transformed that office from a guarantor of statutorily defined rights into a forward operating base for coercing compliance with liberal dogma.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the committee, described her track record as “deeply troubling, if not outright disqualifying.” But he and his colleagues seemed focused on fighting the last culture war — over allegations of sexual assault and abuse on campus — rather than the left’s social crusade du jour: critical race theory.

To be sure, Lhamon’s track record on Title IX is worth scrutinizing. Under her leadership, OCR coerced colleges to adopt a new

“preponderance of the evidence” standard for investigating sexual allegations on campus — a standard critics on left and right say creates a presumption of guilt.

When President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, issued a regulation with a stronger emphasis on due process, even the liberal Washington Post editorial board admitted that DeVos got quite a bit right.

Yet Lhamon tweeted that DeVos’s regulation takes “us back to the bad, old days, that predate my birth, when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” When Sen. Bill

Cassidy (R-La.) asked about this statement, Lhamon stood by it, declaring that the DeVos “regulation permits students to rape and sexually harass with impunity.”

Lhamon has demonstrated a similar cavalier lack of regard for evidence and due process on another key issue: school discipline. Under her leadership, civil-rights probes became tools of harassment to coerce changes in school policies. These investigations would end only when school districts agreed to adopt lenient discipline policies, notwithstanding evidence that lenience was destabilizing classrooms and boosting violence.

After leaving OCR, Lhamon was appointed to lead the US Commission on Civil Rights, where she oversaw a report on disciplinary disparities. The report concluded that despite substantial disparities by race in school suspensions, “students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.”

The Washington Post pointed out that the report’s citations “did not offer such evidence. One set of data referenced in the report showed the opposite.” Either Lhamon had a sloppy grasp of the evidence on an issue she has worked on for years or she willingly propagated misinformation through America’s premier civil-rights commission.

The GOP senators didn’t challenge Lhamon on school discipline. Nor did they ask any questions on the issue at the forefront of so many voters’ minds: critical race theory.

This year, Biden’s OCR suspended a decision that Illinois’ Evanston/Skokie School District violated Title VI’s prohibition on racial discrimination when it segregated staff by race, instructed teachers to treat students differently based on race, publicly shamed white students based on their race and taught that “whiteness” was a contract with the devil.

The action sent a clear signal that

OCR didn’t intend to enforce antidiscrimination law to protect white students or teachers.

A Lhamon-led OCR could do far worse than non-enforcement going forward. In her previous term at OCR, her modus operandi was to fabricate new interpretations of what civil-rights law requires, then tell educational institutions that they could lose federal funding unless they “voluntarily” agreed to adhere to these dictates.

No one should be surprised if Lhamon actually enforces CRT, by coercing school districts into “voluntary” resolution agreements that require “anti-racist audits,” mandate race-focused professional development for teachers or stipulate the hiring of diversity consultants and staff.

Unless a Democratic senator decides to oppose her or abstain, Lhamon’s nomination is all but assured. The question is whether congressional Republicans will muster the gumption to exercise proper oversight and determine whether — and how — she is transforming the Office for Civil Rights into the Office for Critical Race Theory.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Adapted from City Journal.

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No one should be surprised if Lhamon Theory.’ actually enforces Critical Race