Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from Texas for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I had a law professor who once asked the class: What are the two most beautiful words in the English language? He said due process. I thought the answer might be free speech, but all four of these words are ravaged and devoured by H.R. 9495, which is truly a werewolf in sheep's clothing.

Mr. Speaker, it is a Federal felony crime today to provide any material support to terrorist groups. If your not-for-profit does that, then you are going to prison for at least 10 years and maybe for the rest of your life. Losing your 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status is the least of your worries.

If rendering support to terrorists is already a felony crime, then what is this all about?

Americans have an absolute First Amendment right to give money to support political groups that don't engage in terrorism, like the ACLU, Amnesty International, Razom for Ukraine, and the International Rescue Committee, but this bill would give the new administration unilateral power to designate any of them a terrorist-supporting group and strip them of their tax-exempt status while capsizing and inverting the Constitution's guaranty of due process.

In Freedman v. Maryland in 1965, the Supreme Court found that the government can only impose a prior restraint on speech, which is what this is, if there is first a judicial determination in an adversary proceeding in which the party being targeted can hear all the evidence against them, provide rebutting evidence of their own, and obtain an independent adjudication of the charge by a neutral judge. That is what due process is.

This sloppy bill thrown before us today contains everything condemned by the Supreme Court. The Treasury Department will be able to unilaterally affix the terrorist-supporting label on a not-for-profit group without going to court, without offering any legal proof, without meeting any legal standard, and without giving the target an opportunity even to know the evidence against them.

Although the Treasury Secretary must notify the group that it will be designated a terrorist-supporting organization in 90 days unless the Secretary is satisfied with the group's answer, it remains completely up to the Secretary to make a ``final agency determination'' without meeting any standard of proof.

Once this scarlet letter and the infamy of being designated a terrorist-supporting group are firmly affixed on the organization, the stigmatized then can finally go to a judge. Incredibly, the legal burden is explicitly put on them to prove they are not a terror- supporting group, completely reversing the burden of due process, which properly belongs to the government. A sixth grader would know this is unconstitutional.

This is an unlawful power to vest in any President and a dangerous power to vest in a President who shows no qualms about leveling threats of retribution and revenge against his enemies. The President-elect has said that Special Counsel Jack Smith should be arrested, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the former head of the Republican Conference, should be jailed, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley should be court-martialed.

Mr. Speaker, you can imagine what they would do to a human rights group that dares to criticize Vladimir Putin or another of the beloved autocrats around the world.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, American civil society and the not-for- profit sector must be protected against political censorship and government vendetta.

To get America to bite on this toxic sandwich, they have tucked the rotten unconstitutional meat in with language clarifying that Americans held hostage are not subject to IRS penalties for failing to pay their taxes on time. The Senate already passed this fine legislation, and we could do that unanimously today. Instead, they want us to vote to give the President Orwellian powers and the American not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.

I voted against this bill last week, and I will vote against it today, tomorrow, next week, for the next 4 years, and beyond.

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