There's a lot we won't be able to say about tomorrow's executive order until we see the text, but I want to push back a bit (though not completely) against this thread.
Gertz is right that the Obama DOJ interpreted the Civil Rights Act as giving protection to Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and others, but only—and this is important—where such discrimination was "based on…actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic[ity]." pbs.twimg.com/media/ELeLZP5X…
It's clear in reading the linked memo that the Obama (and previously W) DOJ used the religious/ethnic thing as a mechanism for providing protection under the umbrella of the CRA to (some) people discriminated against on the basis of religion, since religion isn't in the CRA.
It was a workaround, in other words, and—and this is again important—subject to "detailed analysis" or specific allegations of discrimination.
The Times story is vague about what the EO actually says, but it does say that it "will have the effect of embracing an argument that Jews are a people or a race with a collective national origin in the Middle East."
That reads to me as a suggestion that what's happening is a shift away from a case-by-case analysis toward a categorization of antisemitism as racial or national origin discrimination, but that the shift may be inferrable from the EO's existence rather than explicitly stated.
There's a lot of other stuff in the EO that looks to be really bad, most obviously its conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel and its embrace of viewpoint discrimination in federal funding.
And of course Trump has a very long history of addressing and referring to American Jews as if they were foreigners—Israelis—rather than Americans, and any hint of that in administration policy sends up huge red flags.
But the Times piece is maddeningly vague in ways that suggest that the authors may not have had a full grasp of the specifics of what's in the EO, so we're going to have to wait until we see it tomorrow to know exactly how to react to this aspect of it.
Anyway, if this linked tweet is accurate, the EO is going to be horrifying. But the article doesn't quite justify—and in fact appears to intentionally avoid language that would justify—the tweet.
Running between classes, but yes, the Times botched this—even worse than I feared, in fact. But yes, the EO is, as feared, a stealth attack on political speech. More later.
Impressive hat trick for the NYT yesterday: The article, the headline, and the tweet all botched the EO story, and they all botched it in different ways.
