Culture Warrior: Catherine Lhamon is poised to resume her efforts against due process and school discipline.

President Biden has nominated Lhamon to return for a second stint as assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). During her previous term under President Obama, Lhamon transformed that office from a guarantor of statutorily defined rights into a forward operating base for coercing compliance with liberal social dogma on matters ranging from allegations of sexual assault to school discipline to transgender issues.

North Carolina senator Richard Burr, ranking Republican on the committee, described Lhamon’s track record as “deeply troubling if not outright disqualifying.” But he and his colleagues seemed focused on fighting the last culture war—over Title IX and allegations of sexual assault and abuse on campus—rather than the Left’s social crusade de 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 allegations of sexual assault and abuse on campus—a standard that critics on both left and right say creates a presumption of guilt. When 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.

Reasonable minds may differ on this fraught issue—but senators have good reason to doubt whether Lhamon possesses a reasonable mind. In contrast to the Post editorial board’s nuanced take, 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 Senator 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 investigations became tools of harassment to coerce changes in school policies. These deeply invasive investigations would end only when school districts agreed to adopt lenient discipline policies, notwithstanding evidence that these policies were destabilizing classrooms and leading to increased school violence.