Congress is set to vote on the most dangerous domestic antiterrorism bill since The PATRIOT Act

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Forever Wars on November 15, 2024. The bill in question, H.R. 9495, failed to pass last week on procedural grounds and is set for a new vote in the House of Representatives on November 21. Whereas the earlier vote required a two-thirds majority in order to pass, a new vote would just need a simple majority.

For all the disastrous news lately, we dodged a bullet this week. A proposed amendment to the tax code empowering the government to effectively defund non-profits by labeling them “terrorist supporting organizations” quietly slithered through the House of Representatives unchecked until arriving on the floor this Tuesday. 

Proponents of the anti-charities bill, H.R. 9495, exploited the aftermath of Donald Trump’s reelection to fast-track the legislation using a procedure that required a two-thirds majority. Fortunately, a broad coalition of nonprofits sounded the alarm and enough Democrats woke up to defeat the bill—although, shamefully, 52 of them still voted to give the second Trump administration an authoritarian’s ideal housewarming gift. House Republicans appear to be gearing up for another vote as early as next week, one that would require only a simple majority to send the bill on to the Senate. 

As law, the anti-charities bill would be the most dangerous piece of domestic antiterrorism legislation since the PATRIOT Act. Even if it doesn’t survive this lame-duck congressional session, the bill is certain to be reintroduced once the GOP trifecta is in place next year. The next bullet we’ll have to dodge is already in the chamber. 

A Backdoor Domestic Terrorism List

There have been two major lines of attack on the bill. First, it is quite clearly a civil liberties disaster, permitting designation of charities as terrorist supporters without due process and on the basis of secret evidence. The Secretary of the Treasury would have unilateral power to designate a “terrorist supporting organization” and would not have to either explain or provide evidence for such a designation. Because no detailed explanation is required, any judicial review is reduced to a legal spell-checking exercise. Second, thanks to several decades of Global War on Terror authoritarianism, the government already has ample power to criminally prosecute charities on terrorism grounds. It can even seize charities’ assets without due process using sanctions laws. The bill is, on this view, redundant. 

But being both draconian and redundant does not make the anti-charities bill pointless. On the contrary, it promises to solve a longstanding problem for the national security state. Despite decades of antiterrorism as a central organizing logic of government, there has never been a terrorism blacklist of domestic organizations in the United States, thanks to broad opposition—both right-wingers sympathetic to white supremacists and progressive civil libertarians object to the idea. But this bill would introduce precisely such a list, one designed to target anyone seen as supporting Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs while insulating white supremacist and other right-wing groups. 

As FOREVER WARS readers may know, federal agencies maintain many lists of hundreds (if not thousands) of alleged terrorist organizations designated through processes that have long been criticized as opaque, unreviewable, and discriminatory. Because these mechanisms have been applied almost exclusively to foreign groups, courts have largely upheld them on the theory that the executive branch enjoys a comparatively free hand in dealing with international threats – but should pay heed to some constitutional safeguards domestically.

If resurrected, the anti-charities bill would essentially smuggle a domestic terrorism blacklist through the already-existing foreign ones. It would do that by creating a new tier to its terror-blacklisting system for nonprofits accused of providing “material support” to the groups already on most major international terrorism bans. The requirement of a tie-in to international terrorism—again, largely already coded as Muslim—is crucial for any bipartisan appeal. Liberal Zionists can support the bill to brandish their national security bona fides. Right wingers who rail against the “Deep State” can jump on the bandwagon knowing that white supremacist groups will be unaffected.

The other striking feature of the anti-charities bill is how it achieves most of its devastating effects indirectly – and for that very reason is more likely to survive any judicial scrutiny. 

As mentioned above, the government already claims the ability to freeze the assets of U.S.-based groups without due process under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This power was used a handful of times in the early 2000s, most notoriously to shut down the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. at the time. Yet targeting U.S. groups raises significant concerns under the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against seizing property without due process, an area where some right-wing judges are particularly concerned about government overreach. I suspect this is why the few charities targeted in this way were either presented as U.S. branches of foreign organizations or, in the case of HLF, subsequently targeted in criminal investigations leading to asset forfeiture. (In other words, the feds seized the funds first and sprinkled some due process on the case years later.)

By contrast, the anti-charities bill does not seize anything. It merely revokes a group’s tax exemption, theoretically leaving it free to continue operating and even to raise funds. In reality, however, the stigma of being labeled terrorist supporters by the government will almost inevitably lead to ostracization by banks and other financial services providers, with the same end result, to say nothing of everyday donors.

The Revolution Will Not be Defunded?

The anti-charities bill is of course part of a longer story of the anti-Palestinian foundations of U.S. terrorism law, including the legacy of the HLF affair. For years now, Zionist groups have waged lawfare against American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), accusing it of being a continuation of the long-shuttered HLF and a front for Hamas. In the meantime, the U.S. government has conscripted nongovernmental organizations and municipalities in Palestine itself into implementing terrorism screening policies as a condition for receiving foreign aid, as detailed in geographer Lisa Bhungalia’s new book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine.

The sponsors of the anti-charities bill have made no secret of their desire to crack down on the ecosystem of U.S. nonprofits that over the past decade have tentatively mainstreamed Palestine alongside other social justice issues. The bill’s most important innovation—labeling domestic groups terrorists by connecting them to international ones—is an idea that has become increasingly prominent anti-Palestinian policy entrepreneurship in recent years. The right-wing Zachor Legal Institute coined the acronym “Domestic Terrorist Affiliate (DTA)” while calling for federal investigations into Black Lives Matter movement groups in 2020. The Heritage Foundation’s recently unveiled policy blueprint for crushing Palestine advocacy, Project Esther—a sort of anti-Palestinian Project 2025—refers to U.S. civil society groups and campus activists as a “Hamas Support Network (HSN).” It’s easy to dismiss these corny acronyms as crude propaganda, but they help to shape and saturate conversations about public policy in ways that lay the groundwork for more decisive action in moments of crisis.

The October 7 attacks, of course, provided the opportunity to put these long-percolating ideas into action. In November 2023, House Republicans invited testimony from the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies to support H.R. 9495. Although the hearing was ostensibly about campus anti-semitism, FDD’s testimony was notably a rehash of old allegations that AMP acts as a Hamas front, with only a single footnote attempting to link it to student activists.

While a civil suit against AMP has dragged on for years, and the Virginia attorney general has also opened an investigation into the group, the anti-charities bill threatens to effectively finish AMP off. And it won’t just be them. Last month, the U.S. government, acting in concert with Canadian authorities, added Samidoun, a Vancouver-based organization dedicated to solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners, to a Treasury Department terrorism list, claiming that it operates as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Should the anti-charities bill pass, any non-profit that might have worked with Samidoun in the past would also likely be in its cross-hairs. 

After years of repression targeting first the leftist and then the Islamist currents within Palestinian politics, the anti-charity bill now directly threatens liberal U.S. organizations as well. Two Republican House committee chairs earlier this year sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding information on 20 groups, from Students for Justice in Palestine (which isn’t even a registered non-profit) to liberal behemoths like the Open Society Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Here, the right is using the bipartisan appeal of anti-Palestinian racism and the tools of the War on Terror to pursue its broader assault on liberal institutions in its quest for cultural hegemony.

The attack on HLF in the early years of the Global War on Terror had dramatic chilling effects on Palestinian communities in the United States. It severely hampered political organizing in Palestine and throughout the diaspora. While the non-profit industrial complex has never been a revolutionary force, the anti-charities bill raises the stakes further and could dramatically shift the risk calculus of the foundation world when it comes to all things Palestine, with ripple effects for every other interlinked social justice cause.

As in so many other cases, hostility to Palestinian liberation is the tip of a spear aimed at liberal and left causes alike. For that reason, we should expect the right wing to continue pushing the anti-charities bill, and to find opportunities to replicate its logic in other ones. The only question is whether enough liberals will wake up to the threat in time.