Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) slammed the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division for being absent in the face of campus antisemitism while using its time going after peaceful anti-abortion protesters.
Roy, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, criticized Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke for giving Columbia Law School’s commencement speech this week and apparently glossing over the massive pro-Palestinian protests at the school that sparked a nationwide movement across college campuses.
“Instead of taking meaningful action to uphold Jewish students’ rights or going to the Columbia campus … to condemn the lawlessness, on Monday, Clarke delivered Columbia Law School’s commencement remarks making no significant mention of the surge of antisemitic action on campus and in fact, lumping it into a long train of items in a speech,” Roy said. “Didn’t even bring it up in any significance after Columbia had basically been sacked in protest. All while the Civil Rights Division, by the way, is actively trampling on the rights of pro-life Americans to peacefully protest by prosecuting them under the FACE Act.”
The Texas Republican pointed to the sentencing on Tuesday of Lauren Handy, who received more than four years in prison for organizing a protest at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic.
“We haven’t heard a word about what if anything [Clarke’s] division intends to do about this antisemitic movement among secular liberals on campuses across this country,” Roy said.
Democrats, on the other hand, focused on a different civil rights office: the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The OCR is responsible for pursuing investigations into potential Title VI violations, which protect students from discrimination based on race, color, and national origin.
Subcommittee ranking member Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) slammed Republicans for trying to cut OCR funding.
“When the Biden administration requested an increase in OCR’s funding for fiscal 2024, House Republicans instead tried to cut the agency’s funding by 25%,” Scanlon said. “Ultimately, the final compromise deal left OCR’s funding inadequately flat at a time when Title VI complaints [from] college students have risen sharply and OCR lacks the resources it needs to get through an unprecedented backlog.”
Kevin Rachlin, a witness at the hearing and Washington director of the Nexus Leadership Project, noted during his testimony that the number of investigations per OCR investigator at the Department of Education is 50-to-1.
Responding to Scanlon’s point about OCR funding, Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, another witness and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, said, “When it comes to funding OCR, there also does need to be accountability.”
“I’ve done OCR complaints for many years, and to my knowledge, there has never been in history, a single time, where a university actually lost its funding for antisemitism,” he added. “The words have to mean something. So I think any additional funding has to come with accountability.”
Roy also said Congress should not just look at civil rights solutions, but go after federal funding and endowments for schools, noting Congress allocated $5 billion to Ivy League schools in fiscal 2023 alone. He also noted Harvard’s $50 billion endowment and the University of Pennsylvania’s $20 billion endowment, most of which are tax-free.
“Congress must also examine how we should use our power of the purse in Congress to shut off the flow of taxpayer dollars that are going to universities to fuel this radical ideology,” Roy said. “We continue to have taxpayer dollars flow to these universities while they are treating our Jewish brothers and sisters as we have seen unfold before our very eyes in recent weeks.”
Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) suggested handing campus protesters felony charges for breaking the law, forcing them to live with that charge into their professional lives.
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“If you want to occupy an entire building and commit felony acts of vandalism, how about a bunch of rich, liberal, credit card kids understand what the consequences to a protest are,” he said, noting that Ivy League students have the privilege of being able to bypass criminal accountability for criminal actions.
“We don’t need more federal money and dialogue,” Armstrong said. “We need somebody to say, ‘Hey, you want to do this? … You want to commit crimes on public ground? Then you know what? You can go through the rest of your life with your Ivy League education great, fantastic, it’s awesome. But you’re also going to have that felony designation.'”
