Recently, civil society organizations, including religious, reproductive health, immigrant rights, human rights, racial justice, LGBTQ+, environmental, educational, and civil liberties organizations, ramped up calls for opposition to H.R. 9495, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. 

Civil society successfully opposed its passage on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, pushing Congress to reject the measure. (Vote Roll Call) Yet despite this achievement, the bill is slated for a second vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Markup begins Monday, November 18, with an expected floor vote on Tuesday or Wednesday, when only a simple majority will be required for it to pass.)

Like many bill titles in Congress, this one does not convey the full effect of the proposed legislation. Diverse civil society actors have expressed deep concerns about H.R. 9495's potential to grant the executive branch extraordinary powers. H.R. 9495 could allow the federal executive to investigate, harass, and, in effect, shutter any nonprofit organization based on unilateral accusations of wrongdoing. It provides a poorly checked opportunity to strip them of their tax-exempt status and thus dismantle a civil society entity. This includes news outlets, universities, and civil liberties organizations. Despite the name, H.R. 9495 would also allow the targeting of organizations, even ones like UUSJ, that focus on domestic issues and perhaps even churches and congregations.

James Madison wrote: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Please email your Member of Congress and urge them to consider the ramifications of H.R. 9495. Ask your Member to withhold support for further due diligence and a clear understanding of how these proposed extraordinary powers might be used to silence civil society review of government acts, policies, and decisions.

Why? H.R. 9495 includes the text of H.R.6408, an Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations, legislation which the ACLU and many other civil society actors oppose. 

• H.R. 6408 is deemed to create a high risk of politicized and discriminatory enforcement by granting virtually unfettered discretion to the Secretary of the Treasury to designate a U.S. nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and to strip it of its tax-exempt status if the Secretary finds that the nonprofit has provided material support to a terrorist group, even if the “support” is not intentional or connected to actual violence.  
• The executive branch already has sufficient and extensive authority to prohibit transactions with individuals and entities connected to terrorism.  
• Nonprofit organizations are already prohibited from providing material support to terrorist organizations—it would be a federal crime for any 501c3 to do so.

H.R. 9495 makes it too easy to penalize civil society actors, non-profits, and community-based organizations—churches and congregations among them—even as they play a vital role in rendering services for the needy and the vulnerable or serving the public good by championing policy approaches that our federal government would prefer to ignore. The bill is trying to block a primary democratic tenant—the right to free speech. UUSJ opposes this threat to free speech in recognition that we Unitarian Universalists support the use of inclusive democratic processes to make decisions within our congregations, our Association, and society at large, and we covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression. 

We ask you to send a message to your Representative in the House; it is too easy to imagine a future federal administration using this power in ways unrelated to international hostilities and conflicts or going after bad actors.