The federal government has of late been throwing its ponderous weight around on the question of the standards that colleges and universities use in cases of alleged sexual assault. Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial on that and today’s paper includes a letter on point from Hans Bader, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He protests that the administration is pressuring colleges “to find students guilty even when the facts are murky.”

Indeed so. This is just one more way in which the rule of law is being perverted so that outcomes thought to be politically better (for Democrats and their allies) are reached.

The federal government was never meant to have any such power. The Constitution grants no authority to Congress or the executive branch regarding education. We have this mess only because federal student aid has become the lever that gives the Education Department control over what colleges do. Young men who will be railroaded in cases where, as Bader notes, the deck is stacked against them, can trace their situations back to the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its subsequent reauthorizations.