BY MATT BERG
& CROOKED MEDIA |
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WEDNESDAY
NOVEMBER 20, 2024 |
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I’d have a beer with the dude.”
— John Fetterman, welcoming Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor he famously pulverized in his high-profile Senate race, to Washington. |
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Republicans are pushing a new bill that could allow Donald Trump to crush charities and nonprofit groups he doesn’t like. It’s a disquieting sign of where MAGA may be taking us.
- You know we’re in a tough news cycle when even the ice cream guys take to the barricades. That would be beloved hippie ice cream makers Ben & Jerry’s, which recently became one of the latest organizations to ring the alarm about pending legislation that could hand President-elect Donald Trump the power to smash nonprofit organizations that tick him off. The Vermont-based makers of Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey have been funding grassroots organizations around the country since launching their charitable foundation in 1985 — making this one hardly academic for them.
- On Thursday morning, the House is set to vote on the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act (side note: boy does MAGA love misleadingly-innocuous names for stuff). The bill would empower the Treasury secretary to characterize any nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and immediately strip it of tax-exempt status. Wouldn’t you know it, Republicans often define “terrorist supporting” as any language referencing Palestinian rights. But the bar for what constitutes such an organization might be even lower still if they have their way. The law would expand Trump’s grasp on power and ability to persecute his political opponents, disguised as a bill to help American hostages abroad, according to some Democratic lawmakers.
- “This is definitely a tool that would give Trump more power to go to do exactly the things he said he would do,” Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told What A Day. It’s already illegal to provide material support to a terrorist organization. What’s more, the Internal Revenue Service has the authority to strip an organization of their tax-exempt status if they’re breaking the law. So, the legislation “flips things on its head” and gives the Treasury secretary total power, Hamadanchy added.
Organizations accused of breaking the law could fight in court, “but at that point, the damage is already done,” he said.
- In a letter last month, over 140 groups expressed the same concern. “The potential reputational and financial cost of fending off an investigation and litigating a wrongful designation could functionally mean the end of a targeted nonprofit before it ever has its day in court,” the organizations wrote.
- Humanitarian aid nonprofit Oxfam is worried that the legislation could severely undermine their operations in Gaza and around the world, Abby Maxman, CEO of Oxfam America, told What A Day. It’s not the first time the organization has been targeted, she said, but it’s usually under attack by repressive regimes — not the United States of America. “We have seen this playbook before in other governments around the world used to crush dissent, and we're now seeing it here at home,” Maxman added.
The GOP-controlled House is expected to pass the bill. It’s unclear whether the Senate would take it up or whether President Joe Biden would sign it. Regardless, it shows a pathway for Donald Trump to expand his power in the years to come.
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The Senate is currently voting (in a very long procedure) on whether to block $20 billion in arms sales to Israel, following Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) decision to force a vote on the matter over concerns with Israel’s handling of the Gaza war.
The resolution isn’t expected to pass. But the result is likely to show how support for U.S. policy toward Israel’s of the war has shifted since it began more than a year ago, and showcase dissatisfaction on the left. Israel’s military operation has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials. Far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rebuffed President Biden’s calls to scale the war back.
“This is really almost an embarrassment, in my mind, for the Biden administration,” Sanders told Pod Save The World. “Every request that the Biden administration has made to Netanyahu has been totally rebuffed, laughed at, ignored. And I think finally, the United States Senate has got to say enough is enough.” Meanwhile at the United Nations, the U.S. vetoed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, because it doesn’t also call for the release of hostages being held in the territory. Of the Security Council members, 14 of 15 voted for the resolution. |
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The ACLU knows exactly what kind of threats we're up against in a second Donald Trump term.
Mass deportations. Nationwide abortion bans. Unprecedented expansion of executive power and crackdowns on free speech and other First Amendment rights. Project 2025.
The ACLU is prepared for these threats. They took legal action against Trump's administration 434 times when he was first in office, and they will do it again. The ACLU has the playbook to fight back – and win – once again.
Join the ACLU today to help protect immigrants' rights, abortion rights, free speech and so much more in a Trump presidency.
The ACLU is built for moments like this. With your support, they will hold the Trump administration accountable and defend our most fundamental civil rights.
Join today to ensure the ACLU can put lawyers in courtrooms, advocates in front of state legislatures, and organizers in communities all over the country who will stop the Trump administration from enacting their extreme Project 2025 agenda.
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The House Ethics Committee decided not to release the highly-anticipated report detailing sexual misconduct allegations against Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s notoriously scandalous and widely-seen-as-unqualified pick for attorney general. Democrats are expected to force a vote to release the report — but we’ll see whether it’s leaked first. Meanwhile, new tawdry details keep coming out….
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is open to discussing a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine with his bff Donald Trump, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. But Putin isn’t willing to give up land and doesn’t want Ukraine to have a chance to join NATO — making it unlikely that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would agree to such a deal.
Trump picked Matthew Whitaker, his former acting attorney general, to be the next U.S. ambassador to NATO. Whitaker was a B-lister from the first Trump administration who didn’t serve long, and was best known for his prior work on the advisory board of a bizarre invention-promotion company that hawked Bigfoot paraphernalia, “masculine toilets” for especially well-endowed men, and a future when “time travel” tech is possible. What will he do at NATO? Presumably, send Bigfoot into battle on a time-traveling toilet. Take that, Putin!
House Speaker Mike Johnson banned transgender people from using Capitol Hill bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities. That comes after a push by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) to bar Sarah McBride, who’s set to be first transgender person in Congress, from using the women’s bathrooms.
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If you're new around here, make sure to check out Crooked's foreign policy show, Pod Save the World. On their latest episode, Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes covered the implications on Trump's national security picks, the latest on Russia/Ukraine, and Biden's trip to G20. Plus, Bernie Sanders drops by to talk about his effort in Congress to ban offensive weapons sales to Israel. New episodes of Pod Save the World drop every Wednesday. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts!
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A new study is raising questions about how dark energy works — you know, the mysterious force you can’t see that scientists believe expands the universe. The fate of the universe could be predicted based on this type of research, which is extremely cool and makes all the chaos in the earthly news cycle feel less heavy, if for only a moment.
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