To No One's Surprise, Republicans Slipped More Destructive Policies Into Their Big Beautiful Bill

As The Big Beautiful Bill—that's its official name now, which is damned weird even by our present standards—grinds on through the legislative process, there's time to conduct a little exploratory medicine to see what exotic viruses the bill's authors are attempting to slip into the body politic. Wait, here's something. From the AP (via The Chronicle of Philanthropy):

Unusual language added Monday to a reconciliation bill from the House Ways and Means Committee—the tax-writing committee—would allow for terminating the tax-exempt status of groups the administration deems “terrorist supporting organizations.” The language mirrors a bill from the last Congress that passed in the House but did not pass the Senate. The definition and criteria for determining whether or how an organization supports terrorism are unclear. The bill also targets nonprofits in other ways, echoing complaints by Trump, who has called the tax-exempt status a “privilege” that has been “abused.” Trump has threatened to revoke tax-exempt status for groups that don’t abide by his directives or agree with his views.

This is obviously a strategy to defang opposition to the administration's policy and/or resistance to the administration's cruel insanity, depending on your view of things. As the story points out, Republicans in Congress tried this scheme last time as a stand-alone bill, and the Senate shut him down. So here's Plan B, familiar to anyone who's read the Aeneid. Leave the big wooden horse on the beach, dude. This bill is so blatantly in violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees a citizen's right to assemble for the redress of grievances, that voting for it should be considered prima facie evidence that a member of Congress has violated their oath of office. No wonder the administration loves it so much.

The people pushing this bill are quite open about the fact that it is aimed at organizations dedicated to protesting Israel's military campaign in Gaza, which presents us with a conundrum. In Israel, hundreds of thousands of people have protested their government's brutality, but over here, we tear up the Bill of Rights because a few hundred students have camped out on various campus quads? We've let someone else's war drive us completely mad.

In a statement, Kia Hamadanchy, a senior counsel at the ACLU, called out the obvious implications of this measure:

“We've already seen the Trump administration falsely conflate students protesting in support of Palestinian rights with Hamas, deport immigrants to an El Salvadorian prison without due process, and detain students thousands of miles away from their loved ones for criticizing U.S. foreign policy. It is not a stretch to imagine how this bill could be used to pressure universities to shut down student groups, scare human rights organizations away from working with vulnerable communities, and further stifle dissent in this country. The Ways & Means Committee must strip this provision from the tax bill before it heads to the floor.”

The provision survived the committee vote, so it remains in the Big Beautiful Bill going forward because it is big and beautiful and not at all a template for further constitutional destruction. Big. Beautiful.