Scipio Tribune

III. One Family, One Vote

Scipio — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dale Partridge, who pastors King’s Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, has a book coming. It is called 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment, his publisher announced it for September, and his own author page says the amendment has been a catastrophic mistake for America and the Church. He has told his audience he wants it gone within ten years.

This site reads documents. So read the one he wants gone. All of it.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

U.S. Const. amend. XIX (ratified Aug. 18, 1920)

Twenty-eight words and an enforcement clause. That’s it. The Amendment does not say that women vote wisely (or anyone votes wisely). It does not say women are prudent, or informed, or temperate, or that their judgment improves the republic (again, or anyone does). It makes no claim about women at all. It names one ground and forbids the use of it. A state may set an age. It may require residency. It may demand registration by a deadline and turn away anyone who misses it. What it may not do is reach for sex. And yet, that’s what Dale wants done; he wants to reach for sex and then discriminate.

That distinction is the whole of this essay, and almost everything said in favor of repeal fails to notice it. Or, blindly ignores it.

What he has actually proposed

Begin with his own account, which is public and not in dispute.

I don’t think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I don’t love women.
I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.

Dale Partridge (@dalepartridge), X, Nov. 5, 2025

That is the motive. The mechanism came a few days later, and it is the more interesting document, because a motive can be argued about forever while a mechanism can be checked.

Why repeal the 19th Amendment for the household vote?
The state wants to treat married couples as individuals, but Scripture says, “The two become one flesh.”
The household vote restores the state’s view of the covenant household.
One family. One vote.

Dale Partridge (@dalepartridge), X, Nov. 7, 2025

So the proposal is not merely subtraction. Something is meant to take the Amendment’s place: a franchise held by households rather than by people, one vote to a family, cast by its head. Hold that next to the text above and the first problem is already visible. The right the Amendment protects belongs to citizens of the United States. A household is not a citizen. It cannot be naturalised, it cannot be of age, and it cannot be denied anything on account of sex. One family, one vote is not an edit to the Amendment. It is a different answer to the prior question of who the Constitution is speaking to, and that question was settled a long way upstream of 1920.

The wrong branch

Set the merits aside for a moment and look at the plan, because the plan is where this comes apart fastest. Asked how repeal would happen, he reached for the obvious recent precedent: if Roe v. Wade could be repealed, he said, then he thinks the Nineteenth Amendment can be overturned. He has put a timeline on it of ten or fifteen years and described the goal as a Supreme Court case repealing the Nineteenth.

Roe v. Wade was a decision of the Supreme Court. The Nineteenth Amendment is the Constitution. A court can overrule its own reasoning, and in 2022 one did. No court can strike language out of the instrument that creates it. There is no cause of action, no standing, no remedy, and no judgment a court could enter that would do it. The comparison he has chosen to lean on is in fact the cleanest available demonstration that his plan is impossible: Roe is the example of what courts can undo, which is courts, and the Nineteenth Amendment is the example of what they cannot, which is text.

The suffragists found this out first, and from the other direction. Before the Amendment existed they went to court to argue that the Fourteenth already gave women the vote, and they lost.

Progress continued to be discouraging, only ten additional states having joined Wyoming by 1914, and, judicial efforts having failed.

Constitution Annotated, GPO (2014 rev.) 2255 & n.1, citing Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162 (1875)

Judicial efforts having failed. That is the record. The courts would not put women’s suffrage into the Constitution, so it took Article V to put it there: two thirds of both Houses, then ratification by three quarters of the states. Article V is also the only door out. Thirty-eight states, or a convention called by two thirds of the legislatures. It has been walked exactly once, for Prohibition, by a country that had changed its mind inside fourteen years.

A Supreme Court case is not a difficult route to that. It is not a route to it. Ten years is not an ambitious schedule for the wrong procedure; the schedule is not the thing that is wrong.

“Restore” is carrying weight it has not earned

Two days earlier he had put it in a sentence: “Repeal the 19th Amendment and restore the household vote.” Restore implies the household vote is something America once had and has lost. It is not.

The franchise before 1920 was not held by households. It was held by men. Unmarried men voted. Widowers voted. A bachelor of twenty-two with no household to head and no one to represent but himself voted, and the married woman keeping a home with six children in it did not. Whatever the arrangement before the Amendment was, it was not one family, one vote. It was sex. Which is precisely the ground the Amendment names, and precisely why the Amendment names it.

This produces a dilemma he has not resolved anywhere I can find, and his own posts reach for both of its horns. Either the unit of the franchise really is the household, or it is the man.

If it is the household, then a woman who heads one votes. The widow votes. The unmarried woman with her own mortgage votes. The divorced mother of three votes. On his own stated principle they must, because the vote attaches to the household and they are the head of theirs. But then the thing he says he is frightened of is untouched, and the single women he has described as a threat to the nation keep their ballots. The proposal does not do the work he wants from it.

If it is the man, then the household is decoration. The rule is sex with a softer name, and it is the one rule the Amendment’s text forbids in terms.

He cannot have it both ways, and the choice is not a detail. It is the entire content of the proposal.

It would not survive even if a state tried it

Suppose a state attempted some version of this without bothering with Article V. The Amendment answers that too, and the Supreme Court said so the only time it has construed the provision directly.

applies to men and women alike and by its own force supersedes inconsistent measures, whether federal or State

Constitution Annotated, GPO (2014 rev.) 2256, quoting Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937)

By its own force. No implementing statute required, no act of Congress needed, nothing for a sympathetic legislature to repeal first. An inconsistent measure is superseded by the existence of the Amendment.

The strongest thing that can be said on the other side

Here is the best version, and it deserves to be stated properly rather than waved at.

Article V contains no eternity clause. Nothing in the Constitution is beyond amendment, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed within living memory, and a constitution that a citizen may not argue to change is a scripture rather than a law. A site that spends its time insisting documents be read as written cannot turn around and treat one of them as holy writ. Partridge’s right to argue for repeal is not in question, and anyone answering him by saying the subject is closed has conceded the more important principle in order to win the smaller argument.

All of that is true. I grant every word of it.

The answer is that the right to make the argument is exactly what creates the duty to make it well, and the case on offer is not made well. What is published in support of it is an assertion that nearly every legalized moral atrocity in the last hundred years was made possible by the female vote, which is a counting claim about recorded votes in legislatures, and the counting has not been done or shown. Alongside it runs a chain of ten captions, from women voting with emotions through to Western nations collapsing, with each link resting on the one above it and none of them resting on anything.

But the deeper trouble is structural, and it would survive even if every one of those claims were established tomorrow. The Nineteenth Amendment does not stand on a finding that women vote well. If it did, evidence that they vote badly would undermine it. It stands on a rule about what may not be used to apportion the franchise. So the claim that the majority of women are not capable of responsible voting is not an argument against the Amendment. It is the argument the Amendment was written to put out of bounds, restated as though the Amendment were not there. To get anywhere, repeal has to show that the forbidden ground is a good ground. That argument is not in the posts, and on the evidence of the posts it is not coming.

What should worry people who do not care about this man at all

Partridge has an audience and a publisher, and neither is the reason to write about him. The reason is the instrument.

The household vote is a proposal to change the unit of American representation from the person to the group, and to let the head of a group cast a ballot that binds an adult who may disagree with him. There is no principle inside that idea which stops at wives. Once the unit is the household, every question about who counts is open again: who heads one, what happens to the adult son under his father’s roof, how many votes a compound gets, who adjudicates it, and which level of government keeps the register of heads. Those questions have answers only if someone is empowered to give them, and that someone is not you.

It is the same pattern this site keeps finding in duller documents. The objectionable thing is rarely the stated goal. It is the lever the goal requires, and the people who will be holding it afterwards.

The Amendment is twenty-eight words. It denies the government one tool and leaves it every other. That is a modest thing to ask of a country, and it has been asked successfully for a hundred and six years.

Sources

The document: Nineteenth Amendment, National Archives transcription, passed by Congress 4 June 1919, ratified 18 August 1920.
Minor v. Happersett and Breedlove v. Suttles, with the quoted passages, from the Constitution Annotated, Government Publishing Office (2014 revision), at 2255 and 2256.
The book and its description: dalepartridge.com, listing 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment; the publisher, NXR Studios, announced September 2026.
The posts quoted above: 5 November 2025, 7 November 2025, and the household vote.
The Roe comparison, the ten-year timeline and the chain of captions, as transcribed by Baptist News Global, The Roys Report and Right Wing Watch.

II. Flock Off

Scipio — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This reached me on the morning of 1 October, and that timing brings it to the beginning of this essay instead of a footnote at the bottom of it. On Monday, September 28, 2026, a Kentucky State Police trooper was killed on Interstate 65. On the afternoon of Thursday, October 1, 2026, the Louisville Metro Police Department set out how it caught the man now charged with killing the KSP trooper, and the account alleges the cameras this essay asks Congress to defund were heavily relied upon instead of the FBI’s constant pinging the suspect’s phone and an eye-witness calling LMPD onto the scene where they eventually caught up to him. I am not going to pretend that is inconvenient and move on. It is one of the strongest cases anyone will ever make for this technology. I am not blind to the alleged benefits technology like this has.

Please note that nothing in this is to be taken away from the tragic killing of Trooper Phillips. Trooper Phillips died protecting the Commonwealth he loved and left a beautiful family behind. This is not something to take lightly.

The trooper was Hayden Phillips, of Glasgow, who had worn the uniform since 2023. He was killed on a Monday afternoon near the Smiths Grove exit in Warren County, and the man charged with it drove about seventy miles north before the search ended. May Trooper Phillips rest in peace, may his family recover from this horrific incident, and may justice be done upon the man who murdered him.

So let’s take the department’s account at full value. Investigators used constant cell phone location pings by the FBI to put the suspect in a general area. A tactical crime analyst in the Criminal Interdiction Division then went to the Flock system and turned that general area into a specific one. Officers converged on Dixie Highway, a Grappler took the car’s rear wheel, and the arrest followed. Chief Paul Humphrey credited “the layers of technology, tools, equipment, great tactics and coordination between officers, detectives, civilians and the community.” A trooper was dead on Monday and the man charged with killing him was in custody the same day. Anyone who wants to argue about plate readers has to start there.

Start there, and then notice what actually happened. Police had a plate. It had been broadcast across the state through at least three alerts over emergency broadcast systems. They had a constant phone ping that had already narrowed the search to a part of one city. An analyst asked a database where that one known plate had been. A citizen called the vehicle in to LMPD just minutes before the police made their approach. That is a targeted query about a specific vehicle in an active murder investigation, and almost nobody objects to it. It is not what the Flock-Off Act is about, and it is not what anyone sensible is frightened of.

What makes that query possible is a different thing entirely and that’s where the issues come from: a standing, permanent, warrantless record of where every car in a city has been, collected from everyone, kept against the day that somebody wants to ask. September 28th is the easiest case that record will ever have to justify itself. An easy case tells you nothing about the hard ones. An easy case tells you nothing about the rampant misuse and abuse that has been occurring by those allegedly securing our communities.

The Court just said the quiet part

On June 29th of this year the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States. Police investigating a bank robbery had used a geofence warrant to make Google hand over Location History data for phones near the bank around the time of the crime. By six votes to three, in an opinion by Justice Kagan, the Court held that this was a search.

We decide the first part of that inquiry today, concluding that the police conducted a search when they gained access to Location History data. An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.

Chatrie v. United States, 609 U. S. ___ (2026) (slip op., at 2)

Read the last clause twice. It disposes of the two arguments that have kept license plate readers outside the Fourth Amendment for a decade.

The first is duration. The answer has always been that a camera only sees your car for an instant, in public, on a road you chose to drive on. The Court was asked to accept a version of that and refused. The reasoning of SCOTUS was not written about phones alone. It is very clear what they meant.

That approach makes all the more sense when, as with Location History, officials can select the time-limited set of materials they want from an all-encompassing database. Then, the durational bounds on the data actually acquired do little to address the Fourth Amendment’s concern about “a too permeating police surveillance.” Di Re, 332 U. S., at 595; see supra, at 12. What creates that concern is that the government can access all of a cell-phone user’s movements, in both public and private places—that it possesses a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities.

Chatrie v. United States, 609 U. S. ___ (2026) (slip op., at 21)

A virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities. That is a description of a plate reader network written by a Justice who was describing something else. The point is not how much the government took out. The point is that it, the government, is standing in front of a drawer containing everything.

The second argument is the third-party doctrine. I.e. you gave the data away, so you cannot complain when the government collects it. The Court had already declined to apply that rule to cell site location in Carpenter v. United States in 2018, and in Chatrie it declined again, finding no good reason to treat Location History differently from the records in Carpenter. The doctrine came from a bank depositor’s cancelled checks and a telephone company’s call logs. It has now failed twice to stretch over the question of where a person’s body has been.

Now hold the plate readers up against that. Flock’s cameras, and similar ALPR devices (AXON) record a vehicle, convert it to data, and ship it to a cloud system where it is retained and made searchable, across countless agencies, across countless states, and the Federal government. Best part of it? It’s all funded by taxpayers. No warrant is required to collect it and, in most places, none is required to query it. Compared with the two hours of Google data in Chatrie, this is longer, broader, aimed at everyone rather than at a crime scene, and queried on an officer’s say-so. If the Fourth Amendment reaches the one, the argument that it has nothing at all to say about the other is running on fumes.

What this essay is not claiming

Chatrie did not decide the constitutionality of license plate readers, it just laid down essential framework. It was about Location History held by Google. It did not even decide the case in front of it. It didn’t have to. because the Court held that a search occurred and sent the matter back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the warrant actually used was reasonable. There remains a long line of cases, starting with United States v. Knotts in 1983, holding that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in a single journey on a public road. Nobody should tell you Chatrie overruled that, because it did not. However, Chatrie built upon the framework that Knotts first laid down. As is the beauty of the Judicial system we use here in the USA.

What Chatrie does is something narrower and more useful. It tells you which way the Court is moving, and it kills two specific defences that plate readers have been leaning on. A court applying this reasoning to a system that follows millions of cars in perpetuity, rather than one car on one trip, is being asked a question the Court has now twice answered in the same direction.

Why defund rather than regulate

This is the serious objection to the Flock-Off Act and it’s truthfully an easy answer. If the complaint is that the cameras are searched without a warrant, write a warrant requirement. Why does Thomas Massie’s bill cut the money instead?

(1) In general.–Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be obligated or expended, directly or indirectly, by the head of any Government agency or by any recipient or subrecipient of Federal funds (including any State, local, or Tribal government) to do any of the following:
(A) Purchase, lease, acquire, install, deploy, maintain, repair, replace, upgrade, or operate a covered camera system or any associated component.

H.R. 10221, 119th Cong. § 2(a)(1) (2026)

Because a warrant rule regulates the asking and leaves the archive exactly where it is. The Fourth Amendment governs searches. It does not, on its own, stop a private company from building a national record of vehicle movements and selling access to it, and it does not stop that record existing for the next administration, the next contractor, or the next officer who decides to look up an ex-partner. A warrant requirement is a rule about the door. The Flock-Off Act is a rule about whether the building goes up with public money. Again, these ALPR cameras are being planted and installed with taxpayer money. No taxpayer money funding it? No cameras used.

Look at what the bill actually defines. In true Massie style, the bill is completely honest about its target.

(3) Covered camera system.–The term “covered camera system” means any fixed, mobile, or portable photographic, video, optical, infrared, biometric, or other electronic device that–
(A) automatically captures and processes an image or a recording of a motor vehicle or a license plate of a motor vehicle using machine learning or other automated image-processing technology to–
(i) extract license plate numbers, motor vehicle characteristics, or other information from such image or recording;
(ii) convert such information into computer-readable data; and
(iii) transmit such image, recording, or information to a remote or cloud-based system for storage, analysis, retrieval, or sharing; or

H.R. 10221, 119th Cong. § 2(c)(3)(A) (2026)

Note what the definition turns on because it is not the camera. It is the retention and the transmission: the conversion into computer-readable data and the shipping of it to a remote system for storage, retrieval, and sharing. The bill is aimed precisely at the all encompassing database, which is the thing the Court said creates the constitutional concern. There is also a deadline attached. Systems already running on federal money go dark within 180 days, as a condition of continuing to receive the funds.

The bill is not absolutist about it either, which is worth saying because its opponents will imply otherwise. Section 2(b) carves out toll collection and cameras operated within a mile of the border in conjunction with Customs and Border Protection. Those are the two cases where a plate is being read for a defined, bounded purpose rather than banked against future curiosity, and the drafting leaves them alone.

Congress cannot hold that plate readers violate the Fourth Amendment and it should not wait a decade to be told. What it has is the power of the purse, and the purse is why these cameras are on poles in towns that could never have afforded them.

The record of what it is actually used for

The misuse is not hypothetical and it is not distant. A Shively police officer, Asad Zahir, was arrested in August after running more than two thousand Flock searches on the plates of a woman he shares a child with, more than two hundred of them while she held a protective order against him. A former Louisville officer, Roberto Cedeno, faces stalking charges. An LMPD detective, Wesley Troutman, is under investigation again over searches on a vehicle assigned to a department employee, logged as drug investigations, after an earlier episode in which he shared his login with a federal agent who ran immigration searches.

Now this and it is billboard worthy… On 16 September the Louisville Metro Police Department cut Flock access from every officer down to investigators and analysts, added training, and started logging searches. Two weeks later the same department was crediting the same system with a capture. Both things are true. The order they happened in is the argument: the restriction arrived after a reporter found the stalking, not before, and it arrived at a department that had been handing the keys to everyone for years.

A system is not characterised by its best day. It is characterised by what it does on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody is watching, and the ordinary Tuesday here involved two thousand searches on a woman who had gone to a court to be left alone.

The strongest things said against this

That the cameras helped catch a man charged with murdering a state trooper. They did, just days ago, and the answer is not to dispute it. The answer is that a system can perform exactly as advertised in its best case and still be the wrong thing for a free country to build, because what is on trial is the standing archive and not the single query. We do not evaluate general warrants by how often they turned up contraband. We should not become a surveillance state.

That the phone ping was surveillance too, and this essay is not complaining about that. A targeted request for a named suspect’s location in an active murder investigation, reviewed by somebody other than the officer who wants it, is what the Fourth Amendment contemplates. A standing record of everybody’s movements queried at an officer’s discretion is what it was written against. After Chatrie, even the first of those now generally requires a warrant.

That the misuse can be fixed with policy. It was supposedly fixed on 16 September, by a department that had already been through the Troutman episode and did not act until the press arrived. Audit logs record abuse; they do not prevent it, and they only work when somebody reads them. That is, if no one is auditing those that watch us,

What to do

Pass the Flock-Off Act. Because a country that has just been told its citizens hold a reasonable expectation of privacy in a record of where their phones have been should not be spending federal money to build the same record of where their cars have been, and then searching it without asking anyone. Yes, the cameras work… They trace EVERYONE. That’s not the point, the point is protecting our Constitutional rights.

The Court has said the government may not stand in front of that drawer without a warrant. Congress can decide not to pay for the drawer.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Benjamin Franklin

Sources

The bill: H.R. 10221, 119th Cong. (2026), the Flock-Off Act, introduced 2 September 2026 by Rep. Thomas Massie.
Official text: BILLS-119hr10221ih, Government Publishing Office.
Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, 609 U. S. ___ (2026), decided 29 June 2026. Quotations are from the opinion of the Court, not the syllabus.
Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296 (2018).
Louisville Public Media, Louisville police limiting officers’ access to Flock network, 16 September 2026.
Louisville Public Media, Shively police officer arrested for using license plate readers to track woman, 26 August 2026.
Louisville Public Media, LMPD detective again under investigation for questionable Flock searches, 1 September 2026.
The 30 September press conference: Spectrum News 1, WSMV, WDRB.

I. Withholding Educational Funding for 1st Amendment Protected Speech

Scipio — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The No Antisemitism in Education Act of 2026 was introduced on 23 April by Randy Fine of Florida, with Claudia Tenney, and reported out of the Committee on Education and Workforce with an amendment on 20 August. It runs to three sections. The operative one is short enough to read in a minute, and the argument against it lives entirely inside that minute.

You have to start with the document the bill points at, because the bill does not define antisemitism itself. It borrows a definition by reference, from an executive order signed in December 2019.

In enforcing Title VI, and identifying evidence of discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, all executive departments and agencies (agencies) charged with enforcing Title VI shall consider the following:
(i) the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which states, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”; and
(ii) the “Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism” identified by the IHRA, to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.

Exec. Order No. 13899, § 2(a), 84 Fed. Reg. 68,779, 68,779 (Dec. 16, 2019)

Two phrases in that order are doing more work than anything in the bill. The definition is non-legally binding. The examples apply to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent. The order’s own author was careful to say that this was guidance for investigators weighing evidence, not a rule that decides cases. Section 4 of the same order says nothing in it alters the evidentiary requirements by which an agency decides that conduct amounts to actionable discrimination.

Now read what the bill does with it.

(a) Requirement.–
(1) In general.–As a condition of receiving Federal financial assistance, a local educational agency or institution of higher education shall treat discrimination that is motivated by antisemitism, including discrimination by students or employees and discrimination resulting from the institutional policies of such agency or institution, as vigorously as such agency or institution treats all other forms of discrimination prohibited by title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.).
(2) Use of the definition of antisemitism.–In identifying evidence, reviewing, investigating, or determining whether there has been a violation of any relevant Federal law, a Federal department or agency, or local educational agency or institution of higher education that receives Federal financial assistance, shall consider the definition of antisemitism specified in subsection (c) for purposes of determining whether an alleged act or omission was motivated by discriminatory antisemitic intent.
(3) Enforcement.–The provisions of this section shall be enforceable by any mechanism available to enforce section 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d).
(b) Rules of Construction.–Nothing in this section shall be construed as–
(1) diminishing or infringing upon any right protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution; or
(2) preempting State antidiscrimination laws.

H.R. 8476, 119th Cong. § 3 (2026) (as reported)

The verb has not changed. Both documents say shall consider. What has changed is who is bound and what happens to them. An agency that considers non-binding guidance badly risks an inspector general’s footnote. A university that considers it badly now risks its federal money, through any mechanism available to enforce section 601. The bill takes an evidentiary suggestion addressed to federal investigators and converts it into a condition of the money that keeps the lights on in every laboratory and lecture hall in the country.

That is not a complaint about the definition. It is a complaint about the lever. Funding conditions do not work by producing correct adjudications. They work by making institutions avoid the neighborhood of a possible finding, because the cost of being wrong is catastrophic and the cost of being cautious is a cancelled event nobody outside the room will hear about. The conduct the statute reaches is decided by a university’s general counsel, months before any agency opens a file, and the decision is never reviewed by anyone.

The strongest answer to all this is in the bill itself. Let’s read it now, together.

(1) Antisemitism is a uniquely rampant problem in the United States, including in educational institutions. According to the most recent Federal Bureau of Investigation data, more than two-thirds of all religiously motivated hate crimes targeted Jews. According to 2025 data, nearly half of young American Jews say they were the personal target of antisemitism in the last year. Forty-two percent of American Jewish college students report experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus.
(3) The October 31, 2024, report found that many educational institutions have exhibited “double standards” with respect to addressing discrimination motivated by antisemitism.

H.R. 8476, 119th Cong. § 2 (2026) (as reported)

Let’s take those findings as true, for the sake of the argument. Add subsection (b)(1), which says in terms that nothing in the section diminishes any right protected under the First Amendment. Add the IHRA text’s own caveat that criticism of Israel comparable to that levelled against any other country is not antisemitic. A reasonable person could read all of that and conclude that the bill closes a real gap and guards the obvious danger on its way past.

The answer is that a savings clause binds a court, and the harm here never reaches one. Subsection (b)(1) tells a judge how to read the statute in a case that gets filed. It tells a provost nothing about whether cancelling next week’s panel is cheaper than explaining it to the Office for Civil Rights. Every incentive the bill creates operates in the gap between the conduct and the case, and the savings clause cannot reach into that gap, because there is no adjudicator standing in it. The same is true of the IHRA caveat: it asks whether criticism is similar to that levelled at other countries, which is a comparative judgment requiring time, context and a tolerance for being second-guessed. An institution with a federal grant at stake has no reason on earth to attempt it.

This is the second time this Congress has used the same lever. On 3 September the House passed the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026 by 237 to 169. That statute is narrower than it has been reported to be: it bars an institution from engaging in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of a major strategic partner, a term it defines by cross-reference rather than by naming Israel, and it requires an annual certification that students may study there on the same terms as anywhere else. It does not reach student protest, and saying otherwise concedes ground that does not need conceding. What it does do is make federal student aid contingent on institutional conduct toward one foreign state. H.R. 8476 makes federal assistance contingent on how institutions weigh evidence about speech concerning that same state. The instrument is identical, and it is the instrument that should worry people. It attempts to disallow higher education facilities from ceasing trade with Israel. It labels it as a way to protest, but the lever herein allow weak support behind the “protesting” done. If a university has been purchasing Israeli pencils for students but finds a better, cheaper one and switches, is that protest? No. Can it be argued as so under this? Absolutely.

American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbied on both. Its lobbying report for the second quarter of 2026, filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act on 14 July, lists H.R. 4795 and H.R. 8476 together under the education issue code. That is a matter of public record. It is also the limit of what the record shows: a disclosure that an organisation lobbied on a bill is not evidence that the organisation wrote it, paid for it, or bought its sponsor, and this essay does not claim otherwise. The bill is objectionable on its text. A bill that needed a conspiracy to explain it would be a weaker target, not a stronger one.

Nothing here turns on whether antisemitism on American campuses is real. It is, and the findings in section 2 are not seriously contestable. The question is whether the United States should make a school’s funding turn on its handling of a definition that the executive order incorporating it twice declined to make binding. Congress can write a rule about conduct. What it is doing instead is writing a rule about evidence, attaching money to it, and trusting a savings clause to hold the line at a place where no one will ever be standing.

Sources

The bill: H.R. 8476, 119th Cong. (2026), introduced 23 April 2026 by Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) and Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), reported with an amendment 20 August 2026.
Official text as reported: BILLS-119hr8476rh, Government Publishing Office.
The incorporated definition: Executive Order 13899, 84 Fed. Reg. 68,779 (16 December 2019).
The companion statute: H.R. 4795, Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026, passed the House 3 September 2026, 237 to 169.
Lobbying: H.R. 8476 and H.R. 4795 are both named under the education issue code in the second quarter 2026 lobbying report of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, filed 14 July 2026 under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.