Some key excerpts:
Up for a potential fast-track vote next week in the House of Representatives, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, also known as H.R. 9495, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a “terrorist supporting organization.”
The resolution has already prompted strong opposition from a wide range of civil society groups, with more than 100 organizations signing an open letter issued by the American Civil Liberties Union in September.
“This 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,” Hamadanchy told The Intercept.
The current version — which was introduced by Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., and co-sponsored by Brad Schneider, D-Ill., and Dina Titus, D-Nev. — is paired with a provision that would provide tax relief to American hostages held by terror groups and other Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad.
Hamadanchy said combining the two provisions was likely a ploy to push the nonprofit-terror bill through with as little opposition as possible.
The law would not require officials to explain the reason for designating a group, nor does it require the Treasury Department to provide evidence.
“It basically empowers the Treasury secretary to target any group it wants to call them a terror supporter and block their ability to be a nonprofit,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council Action, which opposes the law. “So that would essentially kill any nonprofit’s ability to function. They couldn’t get banks to service them, they won’t be able to get donations, and there’d be a black mark on the organization, even if it cleared its name.”
The bill could also imperil the lifesaving work of nongovernmental organizations operating in war zones and other hostile areas where providing aid requires coordination with groups designated as terrorists by the U.S.
If it proceeds, the bill will go to the House floor in a “suspension vote,” a fast-track procedure that limits debate and allows a bill to bypass committees and move on to the Senate as long as it receives a two-thirds supermajority in favor.
The new bill on terror designations for tax-exempt nonprofits, however, would slash through the pesky red tape — constitutional checks and balances — of due process, presumption of innocence, and other protections afforded to defendants accused in criminal court of providing material support to terror groups.
“The danger is much broader than just groups that work on foreign policy,” said Costello. “It could target major liberal funders who support Palestinian solidarity and peace groups who engage in protest. But it could also theoretically be used to target pro-choice groups, and I could see it being used against environmental groups.
This is a common myth (just like “Hitler was elected”), but not true at all. The Nazi regime knowingly committed countless crimes that were illegal under their own laws, from corruption to mass murder - and after the war, Nazi officials were (at least sometimes) persecuted by German courts using laws that were in effect from 1933 to 1945 (since they couldn’t be persecuted for laws that didn’t yet exist, at least not by German courts).
The key lesson here is different, but still highly relevant: Most of the laws of the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic (which in turn had inherited most of its laws from the German Empire, laws that are still largely in effect today), remained intact during the Nazi regime (which, among other things, allowed e.g. two parties to settle a legal dispute in a manner that was barely different from before the Nazis’ rise to power, provided none of the parties was Jewish, of course), but the appointed persecutors and judges were instructed to employ “gesundes Volksempfinden” (difficult to translate, but it’s roughly “healthy people’s subjective interpretation [of the law]”), which was just a fancy way of saying that both old and new laws had to be bent according to the directive of the regime (but the regime insisted that this was how “normal German people” would see the law). There were only a few attempts of both civil and military persecutors to act against crimes committed in the name of the regime, most of them unsuccessful and especially near the end of the war, show trials and kangaroo courts that made a mockery of legal procedure became commonplace.
Judges appointed by Trump have already used questionable to downright illegal procedural tricks to get him out of trouble. This should have been a warning of what’s to come, how more and more appointed judges will both refuse to persecute crimes committed by Trump and his administration while at the same time weaponizing existing laws to use against his opponents, until even this pseudo-legal abuse of state institutions isn’t even necessary anymore.
Here’s another important lesson from Nazi Germany: Within days of Hitler coming to power, so called “wild concentration camps” were created all over Germany. Political opponents, journalists, lawyers, Jews and often times simply people who were personal enemies of local Nazi figures were imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner. These camps were only temporary, but within weeks, a legalization of concentration camp system followed. New legal camps were built, “wild” camps closed or converted within years. The entire process was no secret, with multi-page spreads in newspapers praising them as “hard, but necessary labor camps that turn enemies of the state into useful people”. It was a sanitized portrayal, but even from the officially released photos you could tell that these were places of terror. Importantly, the torture and murder happening there was never legal and a state secret. Courts could now sentence people to be imprisoned at these camps - and anyone who was released (which was most victims, these weren’t death camps yet) had to sign that they wouldn’t talk about what they experienced or else they would be imprisoned again. I could imagine something similar happening in the US as part of the already broadly announced terror campaign against undocumented immigrants.
So what you’re saying is similar: because the courts bent the laws to favor the regime, then in essence what they did was ‘legal’.
Camps are coming, we’ve already set that precedent in recent times with the ‘japanese internment camps’…I grew up near the site of one of the largest camp in the west, that is now the Western Washington fairgrounds… nothing to see here, folks!
I do appreciate the history lesson though, it’s more insightful & nuanced that the pop history I learned.
I would like to add this to your argument.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Canadian_internment
People sometimes don’t know that it was a variety of people that were placed in camps in North America for various reasons during the wars.