President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said he would invoke the Sedition Act to allow the American military to round up migrants for mass deportation programs and to suppress political protests.
During his first term, Trump wondered why soldiers couldn’t shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said. And, of course, the Supreme Court has given the president carte blanche to break the law with impunity.
So why would anyone doubt that Trump would use an agency like the IRS to punish perceived political enemies, stripping groups of tax-exempt status for allegedly supporting terrorist organizations?
The House is expected to vote this week on a bill that would give Trump’s treasury secretary virtually unfettered discretion to declare that non-profit groups are “organizations that support terrorists” and revoke their tax-exempt status. Last week, the bill failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed to get a quick vote. This time it could pass with a simple majority vote on the floor.
Don’t forget that it is a federal crime to provide material support to terrorist groups. But criminal charges, as you know, involve formidable issues like evidence and due process. This will be a purely subjective exercise, imposed on the secretary of the treasury.
“The Treasury Department will not file criminal charges, but will subject the nonprofit to an administrative process and then a court,” said Robert McCaw, director of the government affairs department for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civic body. organization of freedom. “Now, the damage will be done.”
Donors don’t want to be associated with the word “terrorist” and the cost of going to court will send most nonprofits into what American Civil Liberties Senior Counsel Kia Hamadanchy calls a “death spiral.”
And that, of course, is the point.
This bill aims to punish groups that support Palestinian rights. Republicans have asked the IRS to investigate the removal of tax-exempt status from some of these groups. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith recently accused eight nonprofits of subsidizing “illegal activities on campus and beyond” and “potentially” providing support to terrorist organizations overseas.
In a recent social media post, House Speaker Mike Johnson tagged several groups — including Jewish Voice for Peace, the Alliance for Global Justice and Islamic Relief USA. “Your tax-exempt status should be revoked immediately,” he wrote.
In response, about 100 national, regional and state civil rights groups sent a letter to Johnson and Smith, accusing the pair of “flagrant abuse of authority” because of their “personal discomfort with constitutionally protected First Amendment activities – political speech, organization. , and protests by Muslim American, Arab, Palestinian, and Jewish groups.
Such groups are not the only ones to worry about. After supporting the legislation, many Democrats belatedly realized it could fuel the worst impulses of the new Trump administration.
“This bill essentially authorizes the imposition of the death penalty on any American nonprofit or civil society group that is on the enemy list and claims that they are terrorists,” Texas Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett told the Washington Post last week. week. “Whether it’s a hospital that performs abortions, a community news outlet that doesn’t think it’s paying enough attention, or whoever, it’s definitely a group that can try to help migrants in this country.”
Unfortunately, the bill also contains worthy provisions supported by legislators on both sides of the aisle. It will allow the IRS to ensure that Americans who have been taken hostage – as happened in Gaza – or who have been wrongfully detained by a foreign government are not subject to fines for late tax payments while in captivity.
This is why it bears the complicated name “The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.” And why do these critics say that dangerous policy changes are hidden in bills that initially seem harmless.
“They’re attached to the most popular bill that everybody likes because they want to make it harder for people to vote ‘no,'” the ACLU’s Hamadanchy told the Intercept. “The fact is that if they really want hostages to become law, they will pass it themselves.”
Attacks on civil society groups are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the world.
When our country faces the next four years with a president who has been determined by any means necessary, with a legislative branch that is ready to do his bidding and the Supreme Court will not check his power, we must find ways to limit the bad impulses which, do not activate people.
Killing this bill would be a good place to start.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Thread: @rabcarian
