This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election. (Go yell at Colin Allred, Henry Cuellar, and Vicente Gonzalaz instead)
He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”
God dammit, Texas.