MTG Is Confused About the Anti-Boycott Act

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 05, 2025

 

Media outlets with even passing fluency in U.S. politics should know by now that it’s unwise to take their cues from Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. That is just best practice, but it’s a particularly useful rule as it relates to controversial legislation. If there’s one thing for which Greene can be relied upon, it is to misrepresent the views of her opponents.

 

In general, the press is aware of Greene’s reliable unreliability, and they do their best to inform their readers of that condition. That imperative is, apparently, easily discarded when the representative provides media venues with the opportunity to bash Israel’s American supporters.

 

Over the weekend, Greene once again positioned herself far out over her own skis in her attempt to accuse her colleagues in Congress of subordinating core American values to Israel’s whims:

With that, MTG shed her well-earned reputation as a faithless provocateur and emerged as the leader of a righteous “right-wing backlash over free speech.” Greene joined the forefront of a vanguard aimed at defending “Americans’ right to boycott Israel.” The representative helped lead “massive opposition” to the bill on social media, according to Newsmax. She leads a cross-partisan coalition consisting of Republicans like herself (as well as MAGA fixtures like Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz), libertarians (including Representative Tom Massie and the Libertarian Party’s “Mises Caucus”), and Democrats (former Ohio state lawmaker and progressive agitator Nina Turner). Their combined outrage allegedly contributed to leadership’s decision to postpone a Monday vote on the bill.

 

Hard though it may be to believe, this collection of ideologically disparate malcontents has distorted the bill to which they’re presenting unified opposition.

 

The “IGO Anti-Boycott Act,” which is sponsored by New York Republican Mike Lawler and New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer, does not criminalize expression that cannot be regulated. It’s not even a new legislative initiative. The bill amends a 2018 law passed by the GOP-led Congress and signed by President Donald Trump, which has, from its inception, been characterized by its opponents as a violation of the First Amendment designed to criminalize expressions of Israel skepticism. In fact, the 2018 law was an amendment to the 1977 Export Administration Act Amendments (and complementary Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act), which discouraged participation in economic boycotts of countries that are allied or partners with the United States.

 

At the time, the targets of these laws were the Arab League members that maintained and promoted their boycott against Israel. The amendment to the EAA that Lawler and Gottheimer envision would shift statutory language so that it includes not just hostile foreign powers but the international institutions that also promote similar boycotts today, including the United Nations and the European Union.

 

Penalties for U.S.-based entities that violate the law can be steep, and violations include “furnishing information” about a targeted nation to a country that is promoting a boycott, which can be murky. But those who continue to insist that the EAA’s anti-boycott amendments are unconstitutional do so with complete disregard for the Supreme Court’s refusal to even review challenges to their legitimacy. And expanding the targets of this law to include the U.N. and E.U., two organizations that legitimize antisemitism, seems like a no-brainer if preserving bilateral relations with Israel is a paramount objective of U.S. foreign policy.

 

Indeed, some of the proposed law’s libertarian opponents have implied that the Israeli government lobbied in favor of the language promoted by Lawler and Gottheimer, which is somehow untoward. Yes, nations sometimes ask other nations to observe their interests. It would be odd if Israel represented an exception to this rule, and it’s odder still that its unremarkable conduct is treated as though it deserves to be an exception.

 

At the root of this controversy isn’t civil libertarianism but a dispute over whether anathematizing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is a core American interest. That’s a broader debate, but, in this case, it’s not one that you need a lawyer to navigate.

 

Nothing prevents American critics of Israel from refusing to patronize Israeli businesses, shunning Israeli products, or lobbying American commercial, non-governmental, and public-sector entities from doing their best to starve Israel into submission or even non-existence. What’s at issue here is business and governmental relationships, and their ability to engage in discriminatory practices. As Eugene Kontorovich wrote a decade ago, the statutory language and jurisprudence around proscriptions on certain coercive boycott campaigns is well-established.

 

“Given that commercial speech is more weakly protected than non-commercial speech, and given that speech involved here is entirely congruent with conduct, and involves an extraterritorial aspect,” he wrote, “any First Amendment protection of the relevant conduct would be quite attenuated.” It would be strange indeed, Kontorovich noted, if the U.S. did not update its anti-boycott laws to reflect the fact that “non-state organizations” are now the primary executors of those boycotts.

 

None of this legal claptrap has any bearing on MGT’s mood, of which we have all been insufficiently attentive of late. “I represent the base,” the representative recently informed us, “and when I’m frustrated and upset over the direction of things, you better be clear, the base is not happy.” What followed was a Festivus-style litany of grievances with her fellow Republicans, so many of whom are betraying the true spirit of MAGA as she defines it. “When you are losing MTG,” said MTG, “you are losing the base.”

 

Greene seems to believe that the “common ground” that her latest crusade has produced among lifetime Israel critics is a result of their movement to her side, not the other way around. As is so often the case, the representative doesn’t seem to have thought this through.