Donald Trump hasn’t even taken office, and Congress is already moving to advance legislation to expand his ability to target his enemies. The former president has repeatedly threatened on the campaign trail that he will attack
“the enemy from within” using the military. But new legislation could give him unprecedented authority to go after nonprofit organizations he disagrees with.
The House is set to vote this week on a bill that would grant the Treasury Department authority to revoke tax-exempt status from any nonprofit it declares to be a “terrorist-supporting organization,” giving the agency broad latitude to determine what that means.
The legislation, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act (H.R. 9495), was originally drafted to
prevent the IRS from issuing fines and tax penalties to Americans held hostage by international terrorist groups as well as citizens unjustly incarcerated abroad. By putting these two measures together under one bill, Republicans are trying to make it more difficult to oppose.
“They attached it to a super popular bill that everyone likes because they want to make it hard for people to vote ‘no,’” Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
told The Intercept. “The reality is that if they really wanted the hostage thing to become law, they’d pass that by itself.”
Hamadanchy said that this bill is “about stifling dissent and to chill advocacy, because people are going to avoid certain things and take certain positions in order to avoid this designation.”
www.rollingstone.com
