‘A New McCarthyism’ Is How Free Speech Advocates Label Congress’ Probe of Campus and Labor Antisemitism
‘Requiring members of a private organization to answer before Congress for controversial views expressed in internal emails,’ one free-speech advocate says, ‘chills the exercise of First Amendment rights.’
A congressional subpoena of a labor union that passed an anti-Israel resolution is raising First Amendment concerns among critics who say it’s not the job of the legislature to police the way private organizations discuss the war in the Middle East.
The House Education and Workforce Committee is demanding records from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, a union of 3,000 public defenders and legal employees at New York City. Its members were “alienated,” the committee said in a letter last week, after 35 percent of the union’s 1,637 voters opposed a resolution calling for a “cease-fire in Gaza, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and support for workers’ political speech.”
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