Vox Populi
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Jon Queally: 149 House Democrats Vote to Hand Trump $840 Billion for Military
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Despite months of warnings from party members up and down the caucus that President Donald Trump has been “lawless,” “destructive, and ”authoritarian“ in his wielding of power both domestically and abroad, 149 Democratic members of the US House of Representatives on Thursday night joined with 192 Republicans to pass a sweeping military spending bill—a vote that progressive critics say exposes the fecklessness and hypocrisy of what claims to be an opposition party.
The 341-88 passage of the $828.7 billion fiscal 2026 military spending bill came over the objections of progressives who warned that the bill—now headed to the US Senate for final passage as soon as next week—is a tacit endorsement of the president’s policies, even as he has ordered federal agents to terrorize US cities, deployed US soldiers on domestic soil in the face of lawful protests, threatened to annex Greenland and other nations by force, and conducted overseas military operations—including overt acts of war over the last year against both Iran and Venezuela—without congressional notification, authorization, or oversight.
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“If an opposition party votes like this, it’s not in opposition. It may not even be a party,” said Stephen Semler, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Rules Committee who voted nay on the appropriations bill, said ahead of the vote that he looked “at the defense appropriations bill as maybe the last opportunity to prevent this administration from doing something crazy in Greenland or attacking NATO or doing something that we all know is a bad thing to do.”
Earlier on Thursday, the Republican-controlled committee blocked an attempt by Democrats to secure a vote on an amendment to the military spending bill that would have explicitly prohibited the invasion of a NATO ally.
Passage of the military spending bill followed an early House vote on funding for the Department of Homeland Security, in which seven Democrats joined Republicans to get it over the line.
While 149 Democrats voted for the $840 military spending bill, 64 Democrats voted against it.
“Republicans want money for unchecked, unaccountable, unconstitutional military action around the world,” said Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Il), explaining her vote against the bill. “And over half of the Pentagon budget goes to corporations that profit from pain, war, and genocide.”
“You know how they get this done?” Ramirez continued. “By using working families’ needs as a bargaining chip, tying the minimum funding working families need to survive to the maximum funding they can give their billionaire friends.”
“As long as we are funding imperialism and authoritarianism while working people can’t afford the high cost of living,” she said, “I will stand opposed.”
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First published in Common Dreams. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams.
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For far too long, we have pretended to believe that we actually have opposing parties, because we want to cling to the myth that the US is a democracy. For far too long, we have pretended that the massive infusion of “contributions” to candidates of both parties did not really matter and, after all, how else can they win? We continue to pretend the above is true, albeit with brief side trips into reality as we watched citizens being murdered by agents of the state, because to admit otherwise is traumatic and forces us to consider what we must do to rectify it. Just as when we realize our “favorite uncle” is really the family pedophile and we begin to understand that there was a good reason our mother said “Don’t sit on his lap”, we must finally admit that most of what we have been taught is a lie. That despite high sounding ideals held up as our standards, those was not and are not our nation. Once we can admit all of that to ourselves, and only then will we be able to build that nation we aspire to be, a nation that encourages sharing the planet, that doesn’t grant special privileges to the wealthy but simply guarantees the the same rights as the poorest among us, and the right of all human beings to the basic needs of life absent war and domination. But as long as we cling to the misguided hope continually held up to us that “next election will change it all”, we will continue to sink into repression and rule by those who have no moral right to rule anyone.
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Thanks, Mel. I worry that America has lost its way…
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One has to question if we’ve ever had “way” that was fully popular. The evidence that white supremacy is now openly displayed and spoken of as an ideal from the highest levels of our government certainly indicates that the “way” too many thought we had was never “the way” but simply one not enough of us aspired to nor were encouraged to support.
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I’m sure you are right, Mel. But part of me still wants to believe in Dr. King’s metaphor that the long arc of history bends toward justice.
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I’m with you on that, but I also understand that the arc only bends with our help. That’s not only a political imperative, but even more a moral imperative. We must help the arc bend and we must do all we can to bend it faster and further to save lives.
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No words can express my horror, disappointment, disgust.
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