IRS must revoke Harvard tax status without Trump’s – Latest News
Your taxes and mine are getting used to assist tax-exempt elite universities that willfully break the law and discriminate towards Jews, whites and Asians.
It’s a slap within the face.
Yet Harvard professor Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Harvard alum Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are accusing President Trump of “weaponizing” the IRS to strip Harvard of its 501(c)(3) status, which permits it to operate and settle for donations tax-free.
Truth is, Harvard ought to lose that status, as a result of it has illegally allowed the trashing of Jewish college students’ civil rights — whereas concurrently skirting a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed reverse discrimination towards Asian and white candidates.
This isn’t about attempting to make left-wing academia more balanced or much less biased.
Even although part 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue code bars tax-exempt organizations from partaking in “propaganda” or favoring political candidates, the IRS has all the time turned a blind eye to campus leftism.
No one desires the IRS to bludgeon universities into conforming to the president’s excellent of mental variety — after all, underneath a future president, the hammer may swing the opposite means.
So we might should reside with the truth that the majority universities are bastions of left-wing indoctrination.
But calling on the IRS to stop subsidizing racial and non secular discrimination is a ethical crucial.
And in line with Supreme Court precedent, it’s additionally the company’s legal responsibility.
In 1983, the justices ruled that Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial marriage violated the nation’s “fundamental public policy” barring racial discrimination in training, thereby revoking the varsity’s tax exemption.
That case stays precedent as we speak, although it hasn’t been used since to strip one other college of its tax-exempt status.
Now Harvard is guilty of fomenting blazing Jew-hatred via its curriculum and campus climate.
The college has already confessed: Last month, it issued a 500-page report admitting it had allowed a campus atmosphere designed to “drive Israeli students (and Jewish students who feel connected to Israel) out of student life,” and permitted instruction that “normalizes” hatred of Jews and Israel.
A confession isn’t enough, although.
Until the campus is proven to be hospitable to Jewish college students, there must be a penalty.
Revoking Harvard’s 501(c)(3) status means some donors will stroll — and that’s the price it ought to should pay.
The IRS mustn’t stop with Harvard.
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Last yr the Anti-Defamation League gave “F” grades to Princeton, Stanford and dozens of different schools, together with SUNY’s Purchase and Rockland campuses, for permitting rampant antisemitism to flourish. Columbia and Yale bought Ds.
Why ought to taxpayers assist them?
Yet a host of Ivy allies — and even some critics — are claiming ignorance as to what the revocation menace is all about.
The First Amendment-defending Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression got here out towards the hassle, saying that it “staunchly opposes any governmental attempt to coerce educational institutions into ideological conformity.”
Amen: Any IRS investigation ought to be restricted to stamping out unlawful discrimination, not impinging on First Amendment rights or dictating the parameters of mental variety.
President Barack Obama went a step additional, dismissing the investigation into his alma mater as a “ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom.”
But if Harvard have been permitting black college students to be stored off its campus or letting protesters throw nooses over tree limbs, Obama could be main a nationwide refrain of protest.
Discrimination towards Jewish college students is simply as evil, and simply as unlawful.
Meanwhile, some conservatives, such because the editors of “National Review,” argue that the Supreme Court’s Bob Jones normal is simply too obscure, and provides the IRS an excessive amount of muscle.
Congress, they are saying, ought to lay out the grounds for stripping an group of its tax exempt status.
That argument doesn’t maintain water, as a result of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act already protects Jewish college students from harassment. No new law must reiterate that.
As for Trump, he must back off — and let the IRS do its job of impartial review.
Federal law really prohibits the president and different senior govt department officers, besides the Treasury Secretary, from requesting the IRS audit anybody or any group.
Yet final week, Trump posted a message on Truth Social: “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!”
That adopted an April post wherein he requested whether or not the college ought to “be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness’?”
His meddling muddies the water, giving opponents one thing to grab on — and detracting from the open-and-shut discrimination case towards Harvard.
Zip it, Mr. President.
The college’s actions are revolting. Time to crack down — and revoking Harvard’s tax exemption is the way in which to do it.
Money talks.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.
