Editors at National Review Online critique President Donald Trump’s latest attack on an Ivy League school.
The war between Donald Trump and Harvard may be entering a new phase. Just weeks after Trump froze $2 billion of Harvard University’s federal funding and placed the rest under review, triggering a federal lawsuit from the university, the president is vowing to strip Harvard of its tax exemption.
Stop us if you’ve heard this story before. Once again, Trump is extending powers once used and cheered by his opponents. Once again, there is some policy merit to his position, as well as a key legal precedent on his side. Once again, he is going about this in ham-fisted fashion that could undermine his legal case. And once again, what should happen is to permanently restrict the vast discretion wielded by the executive branch and reclaim policymaking authority that by rights belongs to Congress.
We continue to worry that Trump is expanding the unilateral powers of the executive in ways that are likely to be abused by future presidents — especially against conservatives. That remains true even if there is a policy case for what he is doing and even if it may be arguably within powers the law now allows him.
The immediate impetus for Trump’s action is the administration’s concern over campus antisemitism and race discrimination in admissions, including an investigation into discrimination by the Harvard Law Review. The story, however, really begins with Bob Jones University v. United States (1983). The Evangelical Christian university in South Carolina, which only began to admit black students in 1971, banned interracial dating or marriage on campus and barred admission of students in an interracial marriage. The Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax exemption for having a racially discriminatory policy, leading to years of litigation that landed in the Supreme Court’s lap in 1982.
The problem: the IRS had no statutory authority to withdraw a tax exemption over race discrimination. Indeed, nothing in the Internal Revenue Code said anything at all about revoking a Section 501(c)(3) tax exemption for any public policy reason.
