In a new post at Minding the Campus, KC Johnson examines Senator Claire McCaskill’s curious disdain for due process when it comes to sexual assault cases on campus.

Claire McCaskill Declares War on Due Process

Over the past several months, Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) has emerged as the Senate’s most ferocious opponent of campus due process. One of the upper chamber’s unequivocal defenders of the Office for Civil Rights, McCaskill also attempted to browbeat the American Council of Education for representing its members, and convened several town hall sessions on campus sexual assault to which she didn’t invite defense attorneys or civil libertarians.

So it should come as little surprise that McCaskill’s report on campus sexual assault not only backs the OCR’s efforts, but also contains recommendations that go beyond even the OCR’s due process-unfriendly approach. Given McCaskill’s status as a former prosecutor, her disdain for basic fairness has to raise questions about how she handled cases in her previous career.

McCaskill’s 12-page report (with 100-plus pages of survey results) rests on the curious premise that also plagued the White House Task Force document—uncritically accepting that the colleges face an unprecedented wave of violent crime (one in five women will be sexually assaulted) while simultaneously not recommending any increased law enforcement presence on the nation’s campuses. Instead, McCaskill recommends increased training for campus security officials.