The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting.
The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week. But, today, with only a simple majority vote required, the legislation passed the House in a 219–184 vote. This time, it garnered far less Democratic support than it had only days ago.
In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate and was reintroduced in the House this fall.
One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor today, “This is going to be my third time voting against this bill, because I don’t care who the president is. This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”
Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024
When Tlaib was first voting against the bill, most Democrats disagreed with her. Since then, they have become concerned that a law they would have considered reasonable under a Harris administration would be dangerously applied under Trump.
This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election.
He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”
“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient.” Nonetheless, “America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.” For Doggett, the bill itself is less of a concern than the man who could be utilizing it.
“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”
