Yesterday, a shameful display of precisely the wrong kind of bipartisanship took place.
A group of severely misguided Republicans sided with the worst (and outright Jew-hating) elements of the Democratic party to vote down the most critical piece of anti-Semitism legislation to ever come before the House of Representatives.
H.R. 6090 filled a critical gap in the enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.
In other words, the recent bastions of leftist antisemitism — public and private universities that receive millions of dollars in federal research grants — would be required to ensure that their Jewish students are no longer singled out as the only minority group against whom discrimination is seemingly permissible, lest they lose that grant money (among other federal funds, of course).
Title VI (unlike other civil rights laws like Title IX and Title VII) only applies to organizations, principally public educational institutions, that receive certain federal grants and financial assistance. Thus, Title VI covers pre-K through grade 12 public schools, including charter schools; state educational agencies; local educational agencies; colleges and universities, including proprietary schools and community colleges; state vocational rehabilitation agencies and their subrecipients; and other institutions that receive Education Department financial assistance, such as libraries, museums, and correctional institutions.
But it is extremely unlikely, contrary to the assertions of professional right-wing agitators like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, that ordinary Americans and small businesses would ever be swept up in a Title VI lawsuit. Rather, Title VI is about ensuring the non-discriminatory use of federal funds.
It’s abundantly clear why almost half of Congressional Democrats voted against that bill. It’s because they are cheering on the pro-Hamas protests, and they think that Israel, the country founded by Holocaust survivors, is currently perpetrating a “genocide.”
But, excluding the handful of white hood wearers in the GOP’s Insurrectionist Caucus™, it came as a shock that 21 Republicans would chose to vote “no” on this bill based on — to be frank — reservations that 90% of House Republicans voted “yes” on.
Even if a handful of hypothetical issues existed with respect to the bill — or certain members felt that House Leadership had rushed its passage — those considerations should not have outweighed the immense good that passing this bill would bring to Jewish Americans. Particularly the young Jewish Americans who are being harassed, discriminated against, and denied equal educational access to their own universities by a vocal contingent of Hamas-loving, soon to expelled students (and now criminal trespassers).
Those who voted in favor of H.R. 6090 presumably recognized that even if there were alleged issues in the bill, all of which I dispel below, it was more important to send a strong message to the virulent antisemites on both the far left and the far right — when antisemitic hate crimes and incidents have risen by 337% since October 7th — that the United States government cares about the wellbeing of the most persecuted ethnic group in history.
I Have a Good Excuse, But I Can’t Remember It.
I can only hope that those who claimed to have voted “no” for some good faith reason actually did so. After all, it’s more palatable to believe in a lapse of judgment rather than a previously undiscovered absence of morals.
The cynic in me (or perhaps the political realist in me) knows that probably is not the case.
But maybe they did not realize that this was the bill that actually mattered to American Jews. This bill was the true test of whether prior support for Jewish communities was legitimate, or merely lip service. Voting for further military aid to Israel is not the same as doing something to tangibly address the rise in antisemitism in this country. (Jews don’t just care about Israel.) Symbolic displays of support, like voting for resolutions to condemn the antisemitic members of the Democratic Party after October 7th, was just that: symbolic.
Or perhaps, the otherwise well-meaning House Republicans who sided with members who have well-documented histories of antisemitism themselves (like Thomas Massie, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar) were simply led astray by intentional misrepresentations about the bill levied by the aforementioned Professional Jewish Space Laser Researcher (i.e., MTG) and other “luminaries” disgracing the halls of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
The alternative — that Jews deserve to be discriminated against and the federal government should not have the legal tools to stop it — is too ghastly to imagine.
But as any living Jew would tell you, we don’t need to imagine it. Our people have already lived it for Millenia.
The “Con” Job
It’s worth discussing the purported deficiencies some have already claimed existed with H.R. 6090.
Here is a summary of those abjectly false arguments, all of which I rebut below: 1) that this bill was a “rushed” effort to respond to campus protests; 2) that (as if it was a bad thing) the new bill would officially define “antisemitism”; 3) that this bill would somehow grant new powers to the federal government to “sue, prosecute, or sanction more people, businesses, and universities for supposed violations of civil rights law,” [Charlie Kirk’s words]; and most absurdly of all, 4) that this bill would “gut the First Amendment” in order to “pass a Europe-style ban on supposed hate speech.” [Kirk’s words, but similar accusations have been leveled by other Republicans who advocated “no.”].
These arguments are complete and total nonsense. They are pure political hackery and rank partisan spin.
1. A Bill Years (or at Least Months) in the Making.
This Bill was not “rushed” by any means. The bill was first introduced in October of 2023. In many ways, it codified prior executive actions and orders — giving them the imprimatur of federal legislation — including one that was implemented in 2019 by President Trump, and certain administrative regulations nearly 15 years old.
In other words, Congress was doing something that all true Republicans desire — passing legislation to be signed by the President, rather than allowing the executive branch to govern by fiat.
2. The Right Kind of Lawmaking.
This Bill was a critical tool to allow colleges (and other recipients of public funds) to actually take steps to prevent discrimination against Jews.
It doesn’t create a new power for the federal government to do anything, and certainly not to to “sue, prosecute, or sanction more people, businesses, and universities” for “supposed” violations of civil rights law (as Charlie Kirk so ineloquently put it).
It allows the federal government to use the power it already has under Title VI to protect Jews from ACTUAL (not “supposed”) violations of their civil rights via insidious and ancient antisemitic discrimination — in addition to other forms of discrimination that Americans universally agree should be (and are) forbidden by Title VI, such as race-based and sex-based discrimination.
The people who say that Title VI should not extend to protecting Jewish people are saying, very literally, that Jews are simply not worthy of protection under federal law, and that instances of antisemitic discrimination are merely “supposed” violations of their civil rights.
3. The Most Widely Accepted Antisemitism Definition in the World
One key hurdle to effectively protecting Jewish people, which H.R. 6090 fixed, was no formal, enforceable legal definition of “antisemitism” in federal, legislative law. That deficiency was on prominent display during the recent Congressional hearings (at which university presidents were skewered for being unable to even define antisemitism).
Therefore, the Bill adopted the most widely accepted definition of antisemitism in the world — the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (“IHRA”) definition.
This definition was constructed by 31 member-states of the IHRA, including the United States. No other definition is as widely endorsed and used in government, academia, and public and private sectors.
It has been used by the U.S. State Department since 2010 and by the U.S. Department of Education since at least 2019.
It was embraced in the 2023 U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism and has been adopted or endorsed by more than half of the U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia.
To claim that adopting the IHRA definition into Title VI was some rash decision, or that the IHRA is some untested and vague standard, is absolutely ridiculous. This is a bipartisan definition that has been adopted by the United States government and state governments for years.
And during that time, I didn’t see a morass of lawsuits being filed against anyone for their “protected speech,” and the only people who seemed to complain about the adoption of the IHRA definition were those who actually wanted to discriminate against Jewish people.
4. The Bill was Constitutional.
Relatedly, and perhaps most importantly, the argument that this bill is “flagrantly unconstitutional” and would risk outlawing First Amendment protected speech is spurious and laughably false. Section 6(b) of the bill says, in no uncertain terms: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to diminish or infringe upon any right protected under the First Amendment . . .”
Thus, to the extent that any of the examples of antisemitism that are listed in the IHRA definition and are now codified in Title VI would run afoul of the First Amendment, those actions and speech cannot be the basis of Title VI lawsuit.
Is is true that organizations like the ADL have explicitly said that some of the IHRA definitions, if used as a basis for legal action, would raise potential constitutional issues. This explicit carve out in the bill prevents that from happening. Those who claim that the courts might strike down that carveout down, leaving the remainder of the constitutionally-offensive provisions in just don’t understand how constitutional challenges work.
If the enforcement of Title VI’s new antisemitism provisions offend the First Amendment, as applied to a particular case, Title VI will not be enforced in that particular case regardless of whether Section 6(b) survives or not.
Of course, it strikes me as deeply concerning that someone would vote against this bill based on what is, in light of the explicit text of the bill, a non-existent First Amendment risk.
In fact, isn’t protecting the First Amendment constitutional rights of Jewish students to voice their support for Israel and condemn Hamas’s barbarities — to peacefully assemble at Hillel and to pray at Chabad on Campus without being threatened and attacked by antisemites — just as much of a First Amendment concern?
It’s Raining on My Leg, or So I’ve Been Told
I would caution those who think they can simply gaslight Jewish people into believing that H.R. 6090 actually suffered from the deficiencies concocted by the antisemitic wings of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Jews are not stupid.
Jews remember the hard lessons we learned over hundreds or even thousands of years of being hunted and persecuted.
Jews remember the politicians in Germany who said the Nuremberg laws enacted against us did not actually mean what they said, and that legislators who voted against our interests really did care about us regardless of how they voted.
Jews were once misled by the politicians who enacted incremental steps that legally divorced the Jewish people from their society, all while being consoled that these efforts were “just politics,” and that we had no cause for concern.
And then 6 million Jews were herded into camps and murdered.
“Never again” will Jews be deceived by their elected officials.
And we will “never forget” which elected officials failed to help us in our gravest hour of need since the darkest days of the 20th century.
the irked moderate 