Will Congress let Trump kill organizations like Planned Parenthood and ACLU?

Students march in crowd holding Palestinian flags

Nov. 20, 2024 3 AM PT

President-elect Donald Trump has said repeatedly that he will invoke the Insurrection Act so the American military can round up migrants for his program of mass deportations and suppress political protests.

In his first term, Trump wondered aloud why soldiers couldn’t just 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 should anyone doubt that Trump would use an agency like the IRS to punish his perceived political enemies, stripping groups of their tax-exempt status by falsely claiming they support terrorist organizations?

The House is expected to vote on a bill this week that would give Trump’s treasury secretary virtually unfettered discretion to declare that a nonprofit group is a “terrorist-supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status. Last week the bill failed to garner the two-thirds majority required to pass in an expedited vote. This time it could pass with a simple majority vote on the floor.

Never mind that it is already a federal crime to provide material support to terrorist groups. But criminal charges, as you know, involve pesky issues like evidence and due process. This would be a purely subjective exercise, executed at the treasury secretary’s whim.

“The Department of Treasury would not have to file criminal charges, but would subject nonprofits to an administrative process and then the courts,” said Robert McCaw, the government affairs department director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization. “By then, the damage would be done.”

Donors would not want to be associated with the word “terrorist” and the costs of taking a fight to the courts would plunge most nonprofits into what American Civil Liberties Union Senior Counsel Kia Hamadanchy described as “a death spiral.”

And that, of course, is the point.

This bill aims to punish groups that advocate for Palestinian rights. Republicans have already called for the IRS to investigate stripping the tax-exempt status of several such groups. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith recently accused eight nonprofits of subsidizing “illegal activity on college campuses and beyond” and “potentially” providing support to terrorist organizations overseas.

In a recent social media post, House Speaker Mike Johnson tagged some of the 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, around 100 national, regional and state civil rights groups sent a letter to Johnson and Smith, accusing the pair of a “blatant abuse of authority” stemming from “your personal discomfort with their constitutionally protected First Amendment activities — political speech, organizing, and protests by American Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and Jewish groups.”

It’s not just those sorts of groups who should be worried. After initially supporting the legislation, many Democrats belatedly became aware that it could enable the worst impulses of a new Trump administration.

“This bill basically authorizes him to impose a death penalty on any nonprofit in America or any civil society group that happens to be on his enemies list and claim that they’re a terrorist,” Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett told the Washington Post last week. “Whether it’s a hospital performing an abortion, a community news outlet that he doesn’t think is giving him sufficient attention, or basically anyone, certainly groups that might be trying to assist migrants in this country.”

Unfortunately, the bill also contains a worthy provision that is supported by legislators on both sides of the aisle. It would allow the IRS to make sure that Americans who have been taken hostage — as happened in Gaza — or who have been wrongfully detained by a foreign government do not incur penalties for late tax payments while in captivity.

This is why it carries the cumbersome name “The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.” And why its critics say it is a dangerous policy change hidden inside a bill that at first blush seems innocuous.

“They attached it to a super popular bill that everyone likes because they want to make it hard for people to vote ‘no,’” the ACLU’s Hamadanchy told the Intercept. “The reality is that if they really wanted the hostage thing to become law, they’d pass that by itself.”

Attacks on civil society groups are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the globe.

As our country faces the next four years with a president determined to have his way by whatever means necessary, with a legislative branch poised to do his bidding and a Supreme Court unlikely to put any sort of checks on his power, we must find ways to limit his worst impulses, not enable them.

Killing this bill would be a good place to start.

Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian