After College Presidents, Republicans Are Coming for Liberal Donors

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/opinion/republicans-protest-israel.html

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”

(snip)

Meanwhile, the House recently passed, 382-11, a bill that would allow the Treasury secretary to revoke the tax-exempt status of “terrorist-supporting organizations.” Providing material support to terrorism is, of course, already illegal, and nonprofits that violate those laws should be shut down. But the House bill gives the executive branch the power to make these determinations unilaterally, and the measure is clearly aimed at funding for campus protests.

A November hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee at which the bill was discussed was full of dark insinuations about the forces behind Students for Justice in Palestine, which was presented as a terrorist front brainwashing naïve young Americans. An Arizona Republican, David Schweikert, spoke about the need to look at the tax code to ensure that “charitable giving, pretax monies,” are “doing good in the world and not ultimately financing evil.”

None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.

[RandySF]

1. I'm right here.

I can tell them all about my $10, $20 and $25 donations.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. I don't think there's much voter interest in all these right wing social issues

So they can make all the noise they like, who's listening?

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Revoking tax-exempt status for Quakers,

War Resistors League, SANE, American Humanist Association for dissenting against war and/or promoting anti-apartheid is Un-American.