On Thursday, the House passed a bill that could hand the Trump administration near-unilateral power to strip nonprofit status from organizations—including climate and environmental groups, news outlets, and even universities. H.R. 9495, or the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, contains the language of a measure that quietly passed through the House last spring as part of a package of bills rushed through with bipartisan support after Iran carried out retaliatory strikes on Israel. Only 11 Democrats voted against that bill, H.R. 6408, in April—although it then stalled in the Senate. This week, however, the vast majority of Democrats voted against H.R. 9495. Just 15 Democrats voted in favor, joining nearly unanimous support from Republicans. The bill, which grants the Treasury Department a new power to designate nonprofits as “terrorist supporting organizations” and revoke their tax-exempt status accordingly, could head to the Senate before the end of the year.

What changed between April and now is that Donald Trump has been elected president. Trump has vowed repeatedly to take revenge on his political enemies. Those include high-profile Democrats who’ve led legal proceedings against him—like Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James—as well as a wide spectrum of actors that he and other Republicans refer to as “the left.” At a rally in October, Trump called the “crazy lunatics that we have—the fascists, the Marxists, the Communists” an “enemy from within,” who are “more dangerous … than Russia and China.”

As the more than 300 civil society organizations opposed to the bill’s passage noted in a letter sent to House leaders earlier this week, the executive branch could use the authorities granted by this bill to target their “political opponents and use the fear of crippling legal fees, the stigma of the designation, and donors fleeing controversy to stifle dissent and chill speech and advocacy.” All the Treasury Department would need in order to declare a nonprofit a “terrorist supporting organization” would be evidence—however flimsy—that the organization in question offered “material support” to a designated foreign terrorist organization, a list maintained by the........

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