- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
DONALD TRUMP HAS made no secret of his desire for revenge.
On the campaign trail, he joked about being a dictator on “day one” in office, pledged to jail journalists, and threatened to retaliate against political foes who he felt had wronged him.
Now, just days after he secured a second term in the White House, Congress is already moving to hand a resurgent Trump administration a powerful cudgel that it could wield against ideological opponents in civil society.
Up for a potential fast-track vote next week in the House of Representatives, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, also known as H.R. 9495, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a “terrorist supporting organization.”
Because the Republicans control the House. They can start working on bills now and pass them next year.
Bills generally take a while to pass, so getting the work done now means more time for the Don to send his enemies to the gulag.
You don’t need control of the House to work on bills that you don’t even intend to pass until the next session of congress, though. There’s nothing stopping the Republicans, Democrats, or even average citizens from writing bills right now that are intended to be voted on by future sessions of congress.
And the House of Reps voting on the bill next week is also meaningless, because the bill has a 0% chance of passing this session with the democrats in control of the senate - and the House of Reps would then have to pass it again once a new session starts. Which, they probably will - but that doesn’t make the vote next week somehow less meaningless. So the headline is pure clickbait: Congress isn’t about to “gift” Trump anything. The gifts will come next year.
I’m waiting for the I started enacting this bill that hasn’t even gone through the legislature yet, with the claims of “I needed to speed up the process”. Similar to the other article someone posted about the Senate not needing to approve cabinet positions because it will save time.