Bill presents threat to civilized society

This fall, shortly after the election, the House passed a dangerous piece of legislation that many are calling the “non­profit killer” bill.

The bill has an incongruous title: the “Stop Terror-Financ­ing and Tax Penalties on Amer­ican Hostages Act.”

Among other things, it would give the Treasury Department the authority to unilaterally ac­cuse nonprofit organizations of supporting “terrorism” — and revoke their nonprofit status. Critics like the ACLU say it’s a blank check for presidents to shut down organizations that criticize them.

When the bill was introduced in the spring, it was largely viewed as an effort to silence pro-Palestinian activism. At the time, dozens of House Dem­ocrats supported it alongside most Republicans. But after Donald Trump’s White House win, amid fears that the incom­ing president would use it as a tool to bludgeon his perceived enemies, it passed with signifi­cantly less Democratic support.

But really, it should never have been introduced or passed to begin with, no matter the po­litical winds. The bill is consid­ered unlikely to pass the Sen­ate this year, but could be rein­troduced next year and signed by President Trump. This would have a dangerous chilling effect on speech.

Consider the Florida woman Briana Boston, who recently said “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next,” during a phone call with a health insur­ance representative after her coverage was denied. It was a reference to what the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson wrote on bullet cas­ings in a now-infamous target­ed assassination.

Boston has no history of vio­lence, nor does she own fire­arms. But she wasn’t only ar­rested — she was charged with threatening to commit an act of terrorism.

What she was really guilty of was expressing vitriol against corporate CEOs for an inhu­mane business model. It’s not hard to imagine such a scenar­io applied to nonprofits in the coming years either.

Nonprofits are effectively the voice of civil society in the United States. And even with­out HR 9495, they already have severe limits on their speech. In order to keep their nonprofit status, groups have to follow strict guidelines published by the Internal Revenue Service when speaking about elections.

As a journalist who works in the nonprofit world, I’ve seen the resulting self-censorship first hand. Many journalists and nonprofit leaders feared compromising their institu­tions if they warned about Donald Trump’s fascism, or even criticized Joe Biden over Gaza, ahead of the 2024 elec­tion.

Meanwhile, for-profit indus­tries have enjoyed continuous and ever-growing impunity to advocate for whatever they want, no matter how destruc­tive.

For example, the health in­surance and fossil fuel indus­tries play with people’s lives by denying coverage and spewing carbon, respectively, but have been given the right to spend enormous amounts of their ill-gotten gains in campaign con­tributions, putting an outsize thumb on the democratic scale.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United rul­ing, they have greater means to make anonymous donations to Political Action Committees to lobby government and help elect politicians.

The Supreme Court has long considered corporations to be, in a legal sense, people. In con­trast to such abstract entities, we humans can be jailed, si­lenced, or even killed by corpo­rate-controlled systems — and the nonprofits representing our interests can be officially sanc­tioned for “political speech.”

Today, not only do corpora­tions have greater means to speak more freely than the rest of us do, they are increasingly grabbing political power to ce­ment their stranglehold.

Trump’s incoming cabinet will likely be filled with bil­lionaires. And his proposed Treasury Secretary pick — who would ostensibly oversee the department making determi­nations under HR 9495 — is a longtime hedge fund invest­ment manager named Scott Bessent. Trump has also open­ly promised to bend regulations for billionaire investors.

Seen within this context, HR 9495 is not only a danger to civil society’s right to speech — it is a serious escalation in favor of corporations.