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How Section 219, the US-Israel Military Merger, Would Thwart American Democracy
The merger would connect the US and Israeli militaries in unprecedented ways and make it exceedingly difficult for any future president to unwind this partnership with a foreign government, no matter what public opinion says.
Jul 13, 2026
It's called Section 219. Tucked away in the massive congressional spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, this provision of the law would effectively require our nation to permanently entangle the American military with the Israeli military.
Among other things, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative would require the US to share intelligence with Israel and establish a system of weapons research, development, and production, particularly in the domains crucial to warfare in the modern age: artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and various other fields of high defense technology.
The House provision, which has a Senate version known as Section 1217, would also forbid the president of the United States from limiting intelligence collaboration with Israel over its human rights abuses. If the President ever wants to limit such collaboration, he or she must tell Congress and can only cite American national security as a basis.
In other words, these bills would connect the US and Israeli militaries in unprecedented ways and make it exceedingly difficult for any future president to unwind this partnership with a foreign government.
There’s a reason why members of Congress are trying to sneak this bill through right now, buried in a massive and must-pass defense spending bill: This might be their best, last chance to thwart the will of the American people.
If these bills pass in their current form, the US military would be more integrated with Israel’s than with that of any other country, including America's NATO allies.
There’s a reason why members of Congress are trying to sneak this bill through right now, buried in a massive and must-pass defense spending bill: This might be their best, last chance to thwart the will of the American people.
Over the past three years, American public opinion has turned sharply against the Israeli government.
Thanks to the modern miracle of social media, Americans were able to directly see the human carnage as the Israeli military slaughtered and starved, by the most conservative estimate, over 73,000 people in Gaza.
Americans were also able to see the consequences of the Israeli military's ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, which has destroyed ancient cities, including Christian towns, and displaced a million people from their homes.
Most recently, the American people watched as the Israeli government openly convinced the Trump administration to launch an unnecessary, illegal and failed war on Iran that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians, over a dozen American soldiers, and a global economic crisis, including a sharp rise in gas prices.
The American people are simply fed up.
Members of Congress who recognize American sovereignty and respect American democracy must join Rep. Smith and others in opposing these provisions, and all Americans should call on their members of Congress to do so.
According to recent Pew data, 60% of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022.
Majorities of voters under 50 in both parties feel this way: 57% of young Republicans and 84% of young Democrats.
Most Americans oppose further unconditional US military aid for the Netanyahu government.
Recent election results, in which candidates who staked their campaigns on investing American taxpayer dollars here at home instead of overseas in the Israeli military, have also shown that the tide is rapidly changing.
Even prominent conservatives like Tucker Carlson have decried the Israeli government's influence on our political system while once-dominant conservative voices like Ben Shapiro known for supporting Israel have flailed and bled support.
Instead of respecting the clear will of the American people, members of Congress dedicated to maintaining unconditional US support for Israel have introduced bills meant to ensure changes in American public opinion never become changes in American public policy.
This should be unacceptable to everyone in our nation.
Although the US-Israel merger bills are currently making their way through Congress, the fight to strip these provisions from the NDAA is not over.
Just this week, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.)—the ranking member on the House Armed Services committee—announced that he was withdrawing his support for the provision.
“I cannot support endless conflict even though I support Israel’s right to exist,” said Smith. “For these reasons, I will vote to remove Section 224 from the National Defense Authorization Act if it comes to the Floor.”
If the joint technology development, intelligence sharing, and weapons production are enshrined in law, they would become extraordinarily difficult for future presidents or Congresses to undo, regardless of changing public opinion or policy priorities.
The United States would be permanently locked into a strategic alignment with a foreign government, taking away the American people’s ability to decide on the future of the relationship.
Members of Congress who recognize American sovereignty and respect American democracy must join Rep. Smith and others in opposing these provisions, and all Americans should call on their members of Congress to do so.
If joint technology development, intelligence sharing, and weapons production are required by law, they would become extraordinarily difficult for another Congress or future presidents to undo, regardless of changing public opinion or policy priorities.
Our nation would be trapped a strategic alignment with a foreign government, taking away the American people’s ability to decide on the future of the relationship.
The US military is meant to protect American interests, and Congress is meant to serve the American people.
That's why Section the US-Israel merger bills must go.
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Medicaid Cuts Put All Children's Health at Risk—I Would Know
Cuts to Medicaid don’t only hurt the poor, disabled, or seniors—as my family and I learned, they hurt all of us.
Jul 12, 2026
I was 13 years old. We’d just returned from Christmas vacation, and I was asleep in my room.
My mother tells me she heard a noise and found me in my bed, twisted up like a clam, frothing at the mouth. She was in shock. The paramedics came and took me to the ER. I don’t remember anything about it.
That night, I had a CT scan and an MRI. They found an abnormality in my brain called a cavernoma, and I needed surgery right away to correct it. Because it was a delicate operation, I needed not only a pediatric surgeon but a sub-specialist—a pediatric neurologist.
Little did my family know, there is a nationwide shortage of pediatric sub-specialists.
Medicaid and CHIP must be protected. Congress must invest in pediatric care so that no other children are told to wait months for necessary care.
The surgeon on-call that night assured us that I could be cured with surgery, but we needed to get it done as soon as possible to avoid another seizure and more damage. But when my mom called the hospital, they said the next available appointment was more than three months away due to a lack of pediatric neurosurgeons.
I was already isolating myself. Scared, missing school, I withdrew from sports and hid from my friends. At 13, you don’t want to be different, and you definitely don’t want anyone to know there’s something wrong with your brain. The depression and anxiety deepened. And I would have to go on like this for months?
My family was financially comfortable, we had private insurance, and we lived in Manhattan. Yet even someone as fortunate as I was had to wait because there’s a severe shortage of pediatric specialists.
What if it happens to a girl from a poor or middle class family without good insurance, or who lives farther away from good care? How long would her wait be? Would her family be able to afford it all?
Thankfully, I was lucky. I was able to get the surgery sooner before three months passed, and I’m cured now. But having gone through this experience, my mom and I wanted to find out the cause of the deficit in pediatric care—and how it can be fixed.
With the help of a bipartisan advocacy organization that works on these issues, First Focus On Children, we found out that most pediatric specialties are reimbursed largely through Medicaid and its state-tailored companion program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Half of the nation’s children receive health coverage through Medicaid or CHIP, and even children with private insurance rely on Medicaid when they need specialized care. So most pediatric specialists and sub-specialists have to rely on these government programs for reimbursement.
But unlike Medicare and private insurance, which reimburse adult and senior care specialists at much higher levels, Medicaid reimbursements are significantly smaller for pediatric care—though the doctors go through the same expensive training and have the same qualifications. Because of this, far fewer medical specialists go into pediatric care because it’s financially untenable.
As a result, there is a crisis in pediatric care. To make it worse, Congress’s partisan “Big Beautiful Bill” slashes almost $1 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years. At a time when we desperately need more investment in Medicaid, we are going in the opposite direction.
Cuts to Medicaid don’t only hurt the poor, disabled, or seniors—as my family and I learned, they hurt all of us. Healthcare in this country isn’t sufficiently serving those in need. If things continue this way, what will pediatric care look like for my own children one day?
We must do better. Medicaid and CHIP must be protected. Congress must invest in pediatric care so that no other children are told to wait months for necessary care. It’s not only about the “haves” and the “have-nots.” It’s about all of us.
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The Pro-Palestine Movement Is Rewriting the Rules of US Politics
Recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots.
Jul 10, 2026
A major showdown on the House floor seemed imminent. An amendment, advanced by the Rules Committee, was poised to force a rare and telling record vote on stripping Israel of $3.3 billion in annual US military aid.
Brought forward by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and drawing support from key progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Greg Casar (Texas), the measure was set to put every lawmaker's stance on unconditional foreign assistance under a public microscope.
However, the high-stakes vote never actually happened. On June 30, the entire legislative package collapsed under the weight of Washington's internal political warfare. In a dramatic procedural twist, a coalition of Democrats and disgruntled conservative Republicans voted down the mandatory "rule" required to even begin debating the underlying State Department spending bill.
But even if the vote on Massie's amendment had occurred, the result would have been entirely predictable. It would have been defeated, as support for Israel on both sides of the congressional aisle remains structurally entrenched—even as the American public shifts against Israeli policy in historic numbers.
The strategic focus must remain on reaching out to the public, who hold the true power to influence—and even coerce—politicians into making the right choices.
According to a watershed Gallup poll published on February 27, a plurality of Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, leading by a margin of 41% to 36%. This marked the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric over two decades ago that Israel did not hold the upper hand in public sympathy.
Yet the shift is part of a broader, undeniable trend. A nationwide survey published in late June 2026 by Quinnipiac University revealed that an unprecedented 48% of American voters now think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel—the highest percentage recorded since the pollster first began tracking the question in 2017.
This is precisely why Massie's amendment carries such profound weight. It is significant not because US politicians have suddenly developed a collective moral conscience, but because recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots.
For years, conventional political analysts dismissed pro-Palestinian mobilization, claiming Americans only vote based on immediate socioeconomic interests and rigid party loyalties. That assessment has since proven faulty.
The political cost of Washington's complicity became undeniable following the fallout of the 2024 presidential race, a reality later confirmed by those within the inner sanctums of power. In the post-election debates, senior administration insiders admitted that the handling of the Gaza genocide alienated core voter blocks.
The political cost of Washington's complicity became undeniable after the 2024 presidential race. According to Axios, top Democratic strategists conducting the party's post-election audit explicitly admitted to advocacy groups that internal party data proved the administration's Gaza policy was a "net-negative" on the ballot.
This finding—disclosed during internal briefings by Democratic National Committee autopsy author Paul Rivera—confirmed that the party's unconditional backing of Israel directly fractured its base, and ultimately contributed to its loss of the elections.
The upcoming November elections are expected to be fiercely contested, and Gaza will, once more, be on the ballot. Following a series of progressive, anti-war victories in local primaries, The Guardian reported that US foreign policy toward the conflict has effectively "turned into something of a litmus test for the left."
This historic transformation in the popular American perception of Palestine and Israel does not indicate that a political rupture is soon to follow, as US politicians are notorious for their moral flexibility and their ability to spin language in whatever way is necessary to remain in power.
Indeed, the evolution of the language used by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez regarding the word "genocide" in Gaza tells the entire story of how the Democratic establishment is never compelled by genuine moral urgency, but rather by sheer political expediency.
In the early months of the genocide, Ocasio-Cortez hesitated to adopt the term, acutely aware of the deep sensitivities surrounding such language in US media and mainstream society.
"The fact that this word is even in our discourse... demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing," she stated, attempting to navigate an acceptable rhetorical middle ground in January 2024 during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Yet, under the relentless weight of pressure from an increasingly mobilized progressive constituency, she systematically upgraded her language in March of the same year, declaring on the House floor: "If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents."
This linguistic shift continued to intensify until it reached the Munich Security Conference last February, where Ocasio-Cortez finally deployed the term without any qualification. Unconditional US aid, she flatly argued, "enabled a genocide in Gaza."
Ocasio-Cortez is just one of many Democratic progressives who carefully filtered their vocabulary to avoid the political fallout of using the term genocide too early, or too late. Her position was eventually corrected not because of a sudden moral awakening or the discovery of new information regarding the "unfolding genocide," but because the margins of error allowed by a newly conscious American public have completely closed.
Therefore, the strategic focus must remain on reaching out to the public, who hold the true power to influence—and even coerce—politicians into making the right choices.
Ultimately, the current movement serves as a crucial barometer, proving that sustained, grassroots, anti-war pressure is successfully destabilizing Israel's traditionally unquestioned shield in Washington.
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