Urgent! HR 9495 allowing MAGA to target nonprofit organizations up for a vote today!

If you are familiar with the roll out of autocracy in countries where autocrats hold power, nonprofits are heavily restricted. Just this August, according to a New York Times report, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega shut down 1500 NGOs for resisting his policies. Similarly in countries like Poland, Hungary and Venezuela, Non Government Organizations that serve marginalized communities like LGBTQ people and refugees have been quashed. One under reported, yet critically important feature of the process routinely used to quash democratic norms is the silencing and shutting down of NGO’s that challenge the autocratic regime. In Poland, under the previous administration, authoritarian nationalists systematically sought to tear down democratic norms, enacting policies that allowed local governments “freedom” to discriminate against marginalized groups. In Poland under the “law and justice party,” local jurisdictions could, among other things, become “LGBTQ-free Zones,” where anyone thought to be gay, trans or queer could be discriminated against and even arrested, because they were considered “enemies of the state.”

So this is a time for urgent action! According to the Nonprofit Quarterly: The US House of Representatives’ Rules Committee on Monday passed a bill, HR 9495, that, if enacted, would give the US secretary of the treasury the power to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if unilaterally deemed by the Department of the Treasury to be a “terrorist-supporting” organization—a hazy definition that would allow the Trump administration to selectively and arbitrarily target nonprofits viewed as political enemies.

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Be generous!