“Complicit”: Bernie Sanders Attempts to Block Arms Sales to Israel

Senator Bernie Sanders is attempting to block over $20 billion in arms sales to Israel through a series of resolutions.

The Associated Press reports that Sanders wrote a letter to his fellow senators Wednesday saying that “we must end complicity in Israel’s illegal and indiscriminate bombing campaign, which has caused mass civilian death.”

Sanders plans to introduce the resolutions next week under Senate rules that would quickly force a vote on stopping the weapons sales. The Vermont senator is using a joint resolution of disapproval of the sales, a means of congressional oversight of foreign issues.

Sanders said he has support for the proposal, which would halt the sale of missile systems, tank rounds, new fighter jets, and other weapons responsible for the destruction in Gaza. Israel’s war in the territory has killed more than 41,000 people, including nearly 16,500 children, and injured over 95,000, according to Al Jazeera, very likely an undercount.

“We cannot ignore what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza,” Sanders wrote, adding that “much of this carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment.”

“We cannot be complicit in this humanitarian disaster, we must act.”

It’s not the first effort from Sanders to halt weapons sales to Israel. In January, the Vermont senator sought to require the State Department to document human rights abuses committed by Israel after October 7, 2023. The Senate rejected that effort at the time 72–11. Similarly, this effort is a long shot and is likely to encounter significant opposition, not just in the Senate but in the Republican-controlled House.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions are considered war crimes by many experts, and the International Criminal Court is also seeking arrest warrants against him and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The response from the United States has been almost unequivocal support for Israel’s actions, and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hasn’t offered any new solutions to end the war, instead refusing to engage on the issue.

J.D. Vance attempted to fill in the gaps of Donald Trump’s health care “concepts of a plan” over the weekend, but buried behind his pledge to protect those with preexisting conditions came the promise of policies that would actually jeopardize their access to care. And Trump is doing nothing to deny that this would be the case.

During an appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Vance if he could assemble the breadcrumbs Trump has offered into an actual policy plan. Vance responded by pointing out that during Trump’s first term, he chose to build on the Affordable Care Act rather than destroy it.

The Ohio senator explained that this time around, Trump’s elusive health care plan was “actually quite straightforward” and said that the former president would “want to make sure that preexisting coverage conditions are covered.” Vance also said Trump would “want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them.” He criticized a “one-size-fits-all approach” that sorted people “into the same risk pools.”

However, the kind of deregulation Vance refers to is exactly the kind that would make it practically impossible for those with preexisting conditions to get affordable health care, according to Semafor.

When asked for clarification on this position, Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes declined to say whether Trump agreed with moving people with preexisting conditions into different “risk pools.”

“Senator Vance and President Trump share the underlying principles of using more choice in the marketplace and efficiency as tools for better, more affordable health care,” Hughes told Semafor.

In 2017, the GOP-led House passed the American Health Care Act, which included the proposal for a waiver that would do just what Vance had described: allow “insurers to set premiums on the basis of an individual’s health status,” including preexisting conditions. The opposite of a “one-size-fits-all” solution, right?

There’s only one problem: The Congressional House Budget Office issued a report analyzing the bill and predicting that the waiver would result in those with preexisting conditions inevitably being priced out of their insurance.

The report estimated that as a result of those waivers, “community-rated premiums would rise over time, and people who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.

“As a result, the nongroup markets in those states would become unstable for people with higher-than-average expected health care costs,” the report said. “That instability would cause some people who would have been insured in the nongroup market under current law to be uninsured.”

With the waiver, healthier people could opt for non-group insurance plans, which would remain inexpensive, while less healthy people were pushed toward pricey community-rated options. The report estimated that the price of community-rated options would rise until “those premiums would be so high in some areas that the plans would have no enrollment.”

The Senate rejected that waiver, and Trump was ultimately unable to make any substantial changes to the ACA. However, Vance has made clear that Trump would be willing to make the same mistakes all over again should he make it to the White House a second time.

It’s not yet clear what exactly the former president’s plan is. When asked, Trump said he didn’t know because he’s “not president right now.” But his refusal to flat-out reject the concept of separate risk pools should be a huge red flag.

The Trump-appointed judge who threw out the former president’s criminal classified documents case wasn’t up-front about her own conflicts, and now the details of her backroom liaisons are beginning to trickle out.

Judge Aileen Cannon failed to disclose that she attended a banquet at a conservative law school in May 2023 to honor the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, flouting a 2006 rule requiring judges to file formal disclosures when they attend seminars or conferences that could influence their decisions. But it’s not the only time that Cannon has failed to notify the public of her partisan behavior, according to ProPublica.

In 2021 and 2022, Cannon took week-long trips for legal colloquiums sponsored by conservative judiciaries and hosted at an expensive resort in Pray, Montana, where rooms can cost upward of $1,000 per night. The retreats did not go reported until NPR reporters called Cannon out on the omission as part of NPR’s national investigation into gaps in judicial disclosures.

“Judges administer the law, and we have a right to expect every judge to comply with the law,” Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, told ProPublica.

Cannon, who seemed determined to hold up the classified documents case at every possible opportunity, ultimately tossed the case in July on the basis that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Smith is currently appealing the decision with the Eleventh Circuit. (William H. Pryor Jr., the chief judge of the Eleventh Circuit, was also at the May 2023 banquet, though he properly disclosed his attendance.) But her own future on the case isn’t clear: CREW has asked the appeals court to intervene and replace the controversial judge on the critical case.

If the government wins the appeal, they will be able to ask the court to assign a new judge to the case—though, ultimately, the future of the classified documents trial is contingent on the outcome of the November election. Should Trump lose, the case will move forward regardless of whether the government wins the current appeal. But should he win, Trump could use his presidential powers to wipe the federal case off the map.

It turns out that J.D. Vance and the Trump campaign can only point to one already debunked case as proof of their false and racist conspiracy about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Wall Street Journal reports that one of Vance’s staffers reached out to Springfield, Ohio’s city manager, Bryan Heck, on September 9, one day before the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The staffer wanted to know if there was any truth behind rumors that Haitian Americans were capturing and eating pets, ducks, and geese in the town. By that time, Vance had already shared the conspiracy theory online.

Heck told the staffer that there was no “verifiable evidence or reports” and that the “claims were baseless.” But that didn’t stop Trump from repeating the false story at the debate, and Vance continued to spread the rumor even as his home state suffered the consequences.

In an attempt to back up the rumor, Vance’s campaign provided a police report to the Journal in which a Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, said that her cat was possibly taken by her Haitian neighbors. When a reporter went to the woman’s home last week, she said her cat came home only two days after she reported it missing, and was found safe in her basement.

Kilgore, a Trump supporter, said that she apologized to her neighbors with a translation app and her daughter’s help. Another Springfield resident who spurred on the rumor in a Facebook post has also admitted that she was wrong, and took down the post, according to The New York Times. Vance, meanwhile, has not apologized, instead trying to blame the media.

The Republican vice presidential nominee somehow sees a political advantage in pushing the debunked and racist story, even as it has resulted in violent threats against the town’s schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has denounced the story but refused to blame Trump or Vance, but Springfield Mayor Rob Rue doesn’t want Trump anywhere near his town. Considering the threats, and the part that neo-Nazis have played in creating this problem, it’s easy to see why.

More than 100 former GOP officials have signed a public letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president and warning that Donald Trump is “unfit” for the presidency or “any office of public trust.”

Signatories include Republican national security officials who served in previous administrations—such as former Secretaries of Defense William Cohen and Chuck Hagel, former Bush Sr. official and World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster—as well as former members of Congress, including Barbara Comstock and Adam Kinzinger.

“We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues,” the letter says, “but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.” The letter contains a bulleted list of reasons for their endorsement of Harris, including some of her more hawkish foreign policy stances.

The letter calls Trump “unfit to serve” and notes his “dangerous qualities,” including his coziness with “authoritarian leaders,” “contempt” for ethical and legal norms, and “chaotic national security decision-making.” As commander in chief, it says, Trump “promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter goes on to condemn Trump’s incitement of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In the penultimate paragraph of their letter, the authors acknowledge Republican voters’ “potential concerns” about Harris but say they “pale in comparison” to Trump’s record of “chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

This is just the latest showing of support for Harris by prominent Republicans. This week, over a dozen high-level alumni of the Reagan administration endorsed her presidential bid. The vice president has also been endorsed by other prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Harris-Walz campaign has been courting moderate red voters through a “Republicans for Harris” initiative.