Did pro-Israel cash affect Senate votes on Israel arms sales?
Polygraph | Newsletter n°279 | 22 Nov 2024
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*Paid subscribers can access an interactive table that shows how senators voted this week on the three resolutions to block arms sales to Israel and how much money each one of them has taken from the pro-Israel lobby during this election cycle: https://www.stephensemler.com/p/votes-on-israel-arms-sales-vs-pro
Situation
On Thursday evening, the Senate voted on three resolutions introduced by Bernie Sanders to block three arms sales the Biden administration had previously approved for Israel. The resolutions — listed and briefly discussed below — failed 18-79, 19-78, and 17-80, respectively.
In the lead-up to the vote, the White House aggressively lobbied the Senate to reject Sanders’s resolutions (i.e., to vote against blocking the sales) despite the abundance of evidence showing Israel has used the same weapons in war crimes and probably will again based on past behavior. Let this be remembered as how Biden chose to spend his remaining days in office — lobbying senators to approve more weapons for Israel.
It’s hard to say to what extent Biden’s lobbying contributed to the negative outcome of the Senate votes on Sanders’s resolutions, but it definitely wasn’t the only factor tilting the field toward failure.
Study: campaign finance vs. votes
“Study” might be too grandiose a term, but what I did was compare how senators voted on the arms sales resolutions versus how much pro-Israel money (in the form of campaign and PAC contributions) each one accepted during the 2024 election cycle. The section after the one below reveals the correlation between pro-Israel votes and pro-Israel political donations you probably assumed existed but never bothered confirming.
Summary of the three resolutions
1. S.J.Res.111 – 120mm tank rounds ($774.1 million, delivery beginning 2027); Roll call
An example of how Israel uses 120mm tank rounds in Gaza:
January 29, 2024: Six-year-old Hind Rajab was the only survivor in her family’s car after Israeli tanks opened fire. Over the phone, Hind begged rescue workers to come save her. The Palestine Red Crescent Society dispatched an ambulance with two emergency workers. At least one Israeli tank opened fire, killing both paramedics. A fragment of a U.S.-made M830A1 120mm tank round was documented at the scene.
2. S.J.Res.113 – 120mm high-explosive mortar rounds ($61.1 million, delivery beginning 2026); Roll call
An example of how Israel uses 120mm mortar rounds in Gaza:
October 21, 2024: The Israeli military shelled a group of civilians lining up for fresh water at the intersection of Al Quds and Al Falouja street in Jabalia Al-Balad using US-made 120mm mortars. The attack killed at least 5 people and injured 27.
3. S.J.Res.115 –JDAMs ($262 million, imminent delivery); Roll call
An example of how Israel uses JDAMs in Gaza:
July 13, 2024: An Israeli strike on the Al-Mawasi — an Israeli military-designated “safe zone” — killed over 90 people and injured hundreds more. Remnants of a U.S.-made JDAM were found at the scene. Based on the size of the fin fragment, the JDAM was likely fitted to either a 1,000- or 2,000-pound bomb.
Findings: campaign finance vs. votes
I compared how senators voted on these resolutions to how much money (in the form of political contributions) they received from pro-Israel interest groups during the 2024 senate election cycle (2019-24).
Specifically, I compared the median amount of pro-Israel cash accepted by the group of senators who voted against Sanders’s resolutions — i.e., who voted to approve the weapons sales to Israel — to the median amount accepted by the senators who voted for Sanders’s resolutions, i.e., to block the weapons sales to Israel.
The senators who voted to approve the arms sales to Israel accepted over three times more money from pro-Israel donors than those who voted to block the sales. The precise amounts were $197,974 and $63,613, respectively.
If you want a full breakdown of how each senator voted on all three resolutions and the amount each received in pro-Israel donations, you have two options. You can either look up the information yourself (votes can be found via the “roll call” links above and campaign finance data can be found at OpenSecrets) — which I can say from experience is a bit of a faff — or you can became a paid subscriber to see the VIP version of this post, which includes a nice sortable table I made with all that information on it: https://www.stephensemler.com/p/votes-on-israel-arms-sales-vs-pro
^Alt text for screen readers: Senators who approved arms sales to Israel got three times more cash from pro-Israel donors. This column chart compares the median amount accepted from pro-Israel donors during the 2024 election cycle between the group of senators who voted to approve weapons sales to Israel versus the group of senators who voted to block weapons sales to Israel. The median amount for those two groups are $197,974 and $63,613 respectively. Figures refer to votes on S.J.Res. 111, 113, 115; political donations from 2019 to 2024 via OpenSecrets.
Methodological notes: The funding amounts refers to campaign and PAC contributions, tabulated by OpenSecrets for the current election cycle, or from 2019 to 2024. I used median instead of mean in the chart because of the wide range in amounts senators accept from pro-Israel actors. If you use the mean, the ratio is two to one instead of three to one in terms of the amount the No votes (i.e., those who voted to approve the arms sales) took over the Yes votes (i.e., those who voted to block the arms sales). I left a few senators out of this study, for various reasons: Laphonza Butler, D-CA and George Helmy, D-NJ (entered office too recently for OpenSecrets to have reliable data); Mike Braun, R-IN and JD Vance, R-OH (neither one voted on any of the three resolutions); Tammy Baldwin, D-WI (courageously voted “present” on every resolution instead of yes or no); and Ben Cardin, D-MD, Joe Manchin D-WV, Mitt Romney, R-UT, and Debbie Stabenow, D-MI (all announced that they weren’t seeking reelection, thereby deterring campaign/PAC contributions).
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