Democrats Must Do Everything They Can to Block the Dangerous Nonprofit Bill

Even though President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t return to office until Jan. 20, Congress is already advancing the most sweeping and dangerous counterterrorism legislation in a generation, which would give him the power to shut down legitimate civil society groups that do important philanthropy and community organizing. , human rights and humanitarian activities.

Earlier this week, Dom passed HR 9495, an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code that gives the Treasury Department the power to unilaterally designate nonprofit groups as “terrorist supporting organizations” and suspend their charitable tax exemptions without giving the groups due process or access to evidence against them. The resulting stigma of such a designation would almost certainly be enough to scare off the banks, probably putting these groups out of business altogether.

The drive to kill nonprofits is dangerous no matter who is president, and over the past few weeks, most House Democrats seem to have realized the law’s risks. As recently as last week, 52 Democrats voted in favor of the bill, but by Thursday’s next vote, only 15 had voted in favor. But it was enough to give Republicans the votes they needed to pass it. Looking ahead, the demand of anyone watching the process should be clear: even one Democratic vote is too many, and Senate Democrats must pledge not to support the legislation.

It is not difficult to understand the reason for this sudden attack on non-profit organizations. The authors of the bill did not a secret of their desire to smear certain non-profits associated with campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza as working for Hamas – a claim for which there is no evidence. Israel’s supporters in Congress and elsewhere have made their agenda to suppress Palestinian human rights activities in the United States equally clear. Just last month, the Heritage Foundation unveiled “Project Esther,” a political plan to attack Palestinian rights advocates for higher education and profits — essentially the anti-Palestinian Project 2025.

But the dangers go far beyond a single problem. Earlier this year, two Republican House committee chairmen sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding information on 20 groups, from Students for Justice in Palestine (which isn’t even a registered nonprofit) to liberal giants like Open Society Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Such prosecutions will complicate an already draconian legal landscape for nonprofits and political organizations. As well as defenders of civil liberties notedproviding “material support” to groups designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) has been a federal crime since the 1990s. The material support statute extends far beyond blocking funds to punish the many forms of speech and propaganda normally protected by the First Amendment. And under the broad powers of the sanctions laws, the government also announced the authority to freeze the assets of US-based organizations without due process, shutting down several American Muslim charities after 9/11 as part of a broader crackdown on Palestinians in especially the area Chicago.

The danger of the new proposal is that sweeping powers to eliminate civil society groups are being passed off as incremental change. Federal agencies maintain many lists of suspected terrorist organizations through designation processes that have long been criticized as opaque, unreviewable and discriminatory against Muslims. Because these mechanisms applied almost exclusively to foreign groups, the courts largely upheld them on the theory that the executive branch enjoyed comparative free hand in the fight against international threats.

Thus, despite the massive expansion of government surveillance and police powers after 9/11, many laws aimed at targeting foreign terrorist groups have never had domestic counterparts. The Financial Support Act is the exception that proves the rule: it allows for the punishment of US citizens, but only for support groups on the FTO list. The primary legal reason for this was the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of association. The main political reason was pushback from right-wing politicians sympathetic to white nationalist groups, as well as progressive civil libertarians.

This bill creates yet another terrorism list without due process, but one that is parasitic on existing ones. By linking the designation of US nonprofits to existing lists of terrorist groups, which consist only of predominantly Muslim foreign groups, the bill creates a domestic terrorism regime that almost inevitably excludes white nationalists.

Unsurprisingly, the coalition needed to overcome skepticism from the left and the right about banning domestic organizations on the grounds of terrorism is being catalyzed by bipartisan hostility to the liberation of Palestine on Capitol Hill. There is a longer story at work here: Almost every major development in anti-terrorism legislation in the decades before 9/11 was largely motivated by bipartisan opposition to the Palestinian National Liberation Movement and its allies. The word “terrorism” first appeared in a 1969 federal law limiting humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees. The 1996 Financial Support Statute was the result of intense lobbying by pro-Israel groups seeking to suppress Palestinian diaspora activism. It wasn’t long before these laws were used against Muslim communities more broadly and contributed to the erosion of civil liberties for all Americans. Likewise, it is very easy to see how the list of “terrorist supporting organizations” could grow and become the basis for broader forms of sanctions and domestic repression, especially under a second Trump administration.

Democrats still control the Senate until January and will still have a filibuster after that. Unless they do everything they can to prevent this bill from becoming law, it will be just the latest betrayal in the right’s long and self-destructive embrace of draconian politics — and likely a sign of much worse to come.