Democrats block Senate from taking up House-passed Israel bill

Democrats rejected an attempt by Senate conservatives to vote on the House’s Israel bill on Tuesday as Washington fights over whether to consider the aid on its own or as part of a broader national security package.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), joined by Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Rick Scott (R-FL), requested unanimous consent on the measure, which provides $14 billion for Israel’s defense, but were blocked by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the top appropriator in the Senate.

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The Republican bill passed the House last week with the support of 12 Democrats, but its one-for-one cuts to the IRS make it a nonstarter for most of the party. Democrats have their own conditions for the aid, with President Joe Biden asking that it be joined with controversial money for Ukraine.

Republican leadership in the Senate supports that approach but faces resistance from members of their conference frustrated by the United States’s open-ended commitment to the conflict.

Marshall, speaking on the one-month anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks, accused Democrats of holding the Israel money hostage. He urged its immediate passage separate and apart from the $106 billion supplemental, aligning himself with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and conservatives in the House.

“What if it were your family in these body bags?” he said on the Senate floor, standing in front of photos from the Oct. 7 invasion.

Murray objected to the House bill, but not before she and seven of her Democratic colleagues, including the chairmen of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, launched into a spirited defense of the president’s funding request.

In a series of floor speeches, Democrats railed on the IRS cuts, saying it was Republicans, not them, playing partisan games. Murray called the offsets a “giveaway to billionaires” while noting the Congressional Budget Office projected they would actually add to the deficit.

But the thrust of their remarks focused on the “connectivity” of the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) drew comparisons to the brutality of Hamas and Russia, while Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) likened Russia’s imperial aspirations to Hamas’s desire to wipe Israel “off the map.”

Vance, one of the chamber’s biggest Ukraine skeptics, called these arguments disingenuous, claiming the two are only being paired because Ukraine money cannot pass on its own.

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Murray rejected that line of reasoning, however, describing Ukraine aid as of strategic value but also a moral imperative. To forgo the aid would be to play into Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s hands, she said.

“For American leadership to have any weight in the world, our word has to mean something. Our commitments have to be ironclad,” she said. “That means we do not abandon our allies in their time of need, period.”