They took out the word, but kept the thing

The House just passed the deepest US-Israel military entanglement in fifty years, 216 to 212, after refusing to let anyone vote on it directly.

Opinion by Friendo Media Editorial Board

Before the house passed its $1 Trillion defense bill Wednesday, it made one cosmetic concession to the people trying to kill the thing inside it.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna got an amendment adopted that struck the word “integration” from Section 219. Then the bill passed 216 to 212 with Republicans 209 to 7 in favor. Democrats went 205 to 6 against. Are you curious what’s actually in this bill?

We are too, so we went digging.

The provision

Section 219 orders the Secretary of Defense to designate a Pentagon “executive agent” to run a permanent United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. That official coordinates joint research, development, testing, evaluation, and industrial cooperation across counter-drone systems, missile and air defense, artificial intelligence, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, electronic warfare, biotechnology, and defense manufacturing.

It also directs the Pentagon to go find Israeli-origin and jointly developed technologies that could be built into American weapons programs, and to promote joint ventures, licensing deals, and US-based production partnerships with Israeli firms.

It started life as the US-Israel FUTURES Act, introduced by Reps. Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, and Don Davis, a North Carolina Democrat, with a Senate companion from Ted Budd and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Now the part I want to be careful about, because the loudest version of this story online is wrong and being wrong here costs you the argument, at least IMHO.

Section 219 doesn’t technically merge the two militaries. It doesn’t combine command structures, and it doesn’t put American troops under Israeli authority. It also doesn’t hand Israel any control over US operations. Anyone telling you otherwise is going to get fact-checked and take your credibility down with them. The two countries have also cooperated on defense technology for decades already, from Iron Dome to Arrow to David's Sling. House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers argues the provision mostly improves oversight by putting one accountable official in charge of work that's already happening. AIPAC calls it a natural extension of an existing alliance (of course).

Here’s the problem with all of that.

Public support for unconditional military aid to Israel is collapsing among Dem voters and softening among MAGA. Every year, that aid has to survive an appropriations process in the house, which is the one place a shifting electorate can actually reach it, and stop it.

The insidious part of Section 219 is that it moves this relationship into a dark, closed, process. It gets moved into a “must-pass” annual defense authorization, and furthermore, into the supply chain itself. Once this technology is embedded into American programs, cutting it isn’t simple as calling your congressperson. It becomes a procurement problem for our military, a contracts problem, a readiness problem. As the legislative tracker at A New Policy put it, the effect is to entrench that technology in a way that shields it from the annual appropriations fight.

That’s not a merger. That’s better than a merger, if what you want is permanence in the American military industrial complex. A merger is visible and reversible. This? This is a permanent load-bearing wall being structured directly into our capacity to defend our own homeland.

War criminal, and Israeli PM, Netanyahu, understands these procedural plays perfectly well. In June he called the initiative his plan, and described what it does as shifting the framework from aid to partnership.

The coalition, and the blockade

Look carefully at the list of names who lined up against this, because you will not see this group agree on anything else this year.

Thomas Massie (R-KY) called it an unprecedented escalation of foreign involvement in the US military and said it goes well beyond what we do with Five Eyes. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called it an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy. Ro Khanna tried to strip it in the Armed Services Committee and lost. Bernie Sanders said it hands Israel deeper integration than any NATO ally gets. CAIR wrote to the House asking members to kill it.

Massie and Khanna, who agree on approximately nothing, drafted a joint amendment to remove Section 219 entirely.

They never got a vote on it.

The House Rules Committee declined to make the amendment in order, which is the polite procedural way of saying it will not be voted on. That was the second time in a month the committee had blocked the same proposal. The rule governing debate cleared 214 to 211 the day before final passage, and that four-vote margin is the entire ballgame, because it decided that the one amendment that mattered would never reach the floor.

So members were permitted to vote on removing a word. They were not permitted to vote on removing the program.

Seven Republicans voted against the whole bill anyway: Massie, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane of Arizona, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Anna Paulina Luna herself, and Chip Roy of Texas. Remember their names. They had more backbone than some so-called democrats.

So what happens now?

First, some civics. Remember - the house passing this bill does not automatically make it law. The Senate has its own version of the same initiative sitting at Section 1217, and it hasn’t passed yet.

Whatever survives the Senate has to get reconciled before anything reaches the President’s messy desk.

Which means, there is still a window to stop this, but it closes in the Senate.

I would say it’s time to call your senators directly. Ask them specifically about Section 1217, and why the House was allowed to vote on a single word but not on the whole policy?

Is this truly what we want our hard earned resources going to? It’s a question worth asking directly to the faces of the people responsible.