SECTION 224 UPDATE — IT PASSED THE HOUSE.

NOW IT IS IN THE SENATE.

When I wrote the original piece on Section 224 in late May, the provision was still in committee. I told you to contact your senators because that was where the fight could still be influenced. Here is where things stand as of today, July 23, 2026.

The provision survived. It passed the full House of Representatives as part of the FY27 NDAA. It has been renumbered — what was Section 224 in the original Chairman’s Mark is now Section 219 in the House-passed version. The substance has not changed. The mechanism has not changed. The scope has not changed. Only the section number moved.

And it is now in the Senate, where a parallel version already exists as Section 1217 under the name United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act of 2026 — the FUTURES Act language that could not pass as standalone legislation, now embedded in both chambers’ versions of the must-pass defense bill simultaneously.

WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE THE ORIGINAL PIECE

Several developments have occurred since May that sharpen the picture considerably.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a letter to Congress on June 1 that analysts and critics found revealing. In it, he appeared to claim personal credit for the broader policy shift — describing the move from US aid toward joint defense cooperation, development, production, and investment as, in his words, his plan. That letter drew significant attention because it suggested the initiative originated not from American defense planners identifying a strategic need, but from Israeli government lobbying that found its legislative vehicle in the NDAA.

A retired Air Force Lieutenant General told The Intercept that he could not think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power. That statement came from someone who spent a career inside the defense establishment. It deserves to be taken seriously.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated the vote would be the most watched recorded vote in modern times, saying it would give a list of names of every member of Congress who betrayed America. Greene’s framing is her own and worth noting for the temperature it reflects, regardless of where you stand on the substance.

On the Senate side, Senator Bernie Sanders has objected to the provision, arguing Congress should not give Israel greater military integration than a NATO ally by placing the initiative inside the annual defense bill. Senators Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and others have also raised objections. The opposition in the Senate remains bipartisan in character even if it is not yet numerically dominant.

WHERE THE PROVISION STANDS NOW

The House has passed its version with Section 219 intact. The Senate has its own version with Section 1217 containing parallel language. The two versions now go to a conference committee where House and Senate negotiators reconcile the differences between the bills. The conference report then returns to both chambers for final passage before going to the President’s desk.

AIPAC has publicly praised the inclusion of the provision and the broader NDAA package, which authorizes $750 million for US-Israel cooperative programs — a $65 million increase over FY26 — including $500 million for missile defense, $100 million for counter-unmanned systems, $100 million for subterranean operations, and $50 million for emerging technologies. The lobbying infrastructure supporting this provision is organized, well-funded, and openly celebrating its survival through the House.

The conference committee and the Senate floor vote are the remaining opportunities to challenge, amend, or strip this provision before it becomes law.

WHAT MY POSITION REMAINS

I wrote this clearly in May and nothing that has happened since has changed it.

I am not arguing against a US-Israel defense relationship. That relationship has existed for decades and there are legitimate strategic arguments for cooperation in specific domains.

What I argued then and what I continue to argue now is that the depth of integration proposed here goes beyond anything the United States has formalized with any other country on earth — including NATO allies we have fought alongside for 75 years.

The mechanism remains the same problem it was in May. Legislation that could not pass as a standalone bill because it would not survive direct public scrutiny has been embedded in must-pass defense authorization in both chambers simultaneously. The fact that it is now in both the House and Senate versions does not make that mechanism more legitimate. It makes it more entrenched.

As political pressure builds to reduce US military assistance to Israel, Section 224 provides the framework for continuing and expanding US-Israel military ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the US defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process. That analysis from legislative trackers confirms exactly what I argued in the original piece.

The annual foreign aid vote is the accountability mechanism. This provision is designed to make that mechanism irrelevant by embedding the relationship at the supply chain level.

Once Israeli technology is integrated into US weapons systems at the production level, removing it becomes a logistics problem not a policy choice. That is a fundamental transfer of congressional sovereignty over defense policy that deserves a standalone debate and a direct vote — not a quiet embedding in a trillion dollar bill.

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW

The Senate floor vote has not happened yet. The conference committee has not concluded. Those are the two remaining windows.

Contact your senators directly at senate.gov. Call the office. Send the email. The message remains the same: I am aware of Section 1217 in the Senate version of the FY27 NDAA — the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. I am asking you to oppose its inclusion in the final conference bill and to demand that any US-Israel defense integration framework of this scope receive a standalone vote with full public debate.

This is closer to becoming law than it was in May.

But it is not law yet.

Follow the signal. Stay informed.

— Adam Schultz

Schultz Report | Independent Journalist SchultzReport.com | @SchultzReport

Sources: Military.com US-Israel Defense Integration House NDAA July 14 2026. Military.com Section 224 Analysis June 3 2026. The Intercept Section 224 Investigation June 8 2026. AIPAC Section 219 Press Release July 2026. A New Policy Legislative Tracker Section 224 and 1217 May 2026. Factually.co NDAA 2027 Analysis July 2026. H.R. 8800 FY27 NDAA full text. Senate NDAA Section 1217 FUTURES Act language. Netanyahu letter to Congress June 1 2026.

#SchultzReport #RealTalk #NDAA #Section219 #SystemsThinking #Geopolitics #Sovereignty #CivicAction

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It’s happening. Right now. Right before our eyes. And not a single protester is in the streets. Few people are even talking about it. But hey, at least we didn’t miss the World Cup!

Buried in the 2027 NDAA defense bill — the one that’s supposed to fund American troops, American ships, American readiness — is a provision that has nothing to do with defending America. It’s called the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.”

Strip away the bureaucratic branding and here’s what it actually does: it creates a permanent executive agent inside the Pentagon whose entire job is fusing US and Israeli military systems together — joint weapons research, joint production, shared supply chains, and something called “data fusion,” which means combining sensor feeds and intelligence into a single targeting picture. Shared between two countries’ militaries, as a matter of standing law, not a case-by-case alliance decision.

Congress is handing Israel more military integration than we give NATO — an actual treaty alliance of 32 countries — through a single line item in an annual budget bill.

And here’s the part that should make every American furious regardless of where you stand on Israel: they won’t let it come to a vote. No debate. That is not how we’re supposed to make permanent decisions about our own military’s independence.

Ask yourself what “integration” means once it’s built into law instead of decided fresh each time. It means American targeting data flows through a foreign intelligence apparatus as a matter of course. It means Israeli companies embedded inside the acquisition pipeline that’s supposed to answer to American taxpayers and American oversight. It means infrastructure that’s much harder to unwind than any treaty.

Whatever you believe about Israel as a country or Netanyahu as a leader, that’s a separate question from whether the American public should get a say in something with implications this large.

Supporters frame this as routine, mutually beneficial tech-sharing similar to what the US already does with other close allies, not a “merger.” Don’t believe it.

Once Section 219 is signed into law, the question of whether America’s defense industrial base answers only to Americans stops being a live political question and becomes a settled fact, quietly written into the architecture of the Pentagon itself.

 

 

They called her “the most beautiful woman to ever die.” On May 1st, 1947, Evelyn McHale stepped off the Empire State Building and landed on a parked limousine, without a single drop of blood or a broken bone in sight.

Her legs were delicately crossed. Her gloved hands clutched her pearls. Her expression? Peaceful. Serene. Almost like she was asleep. A young photography student just happened to be nearby. He snapped a photo before police arrived, and captured what would become one of the most haunting images of the 20th century.

Time Magazine published it. Andy Warhol reimagined it. And decades later, people are still captivated by the chilling perfection of that moment. No horror. No chaos. Just a quiet, impossible stillness… frozen in time. They never saw it coming. But the world would never forget it.

 

BREAKING: Mitch McConnell’s hometown newspaper just published a BRUTAL “pre-obituary” absolutely trashing the “detestable” Senator’s political legacy!

He deserves every word of this…

Mitch McConnell hasn’t been seen in public for over a month after suffering a serious medical issue and hospitalization.

The aging Senator is not getting any younger either, so Louisville Courier Journal columnist Joseph Gerth decided to publish an HONEST obituary while the Senator was still breathing in order to avoid the inevitable caterwauling from the right-wing about disrespecting the dead.

“With McConnell allegedly on the mend, I figured I’d go ahead and tell you what I think about McConnell now — when no one can complain, ‘How dare you write that about a dead guy?’” jokes Gerth.

“Let me be straight up now, newspaper staff-written obituaries are not intended to eulogize or lionize the dead. They are intended to tell the truth about the recently departed — or the not yet departed, in this case.”

“McConnell is every bit the detestable figure that Nixon was. But unlike Nixon, McConnell never paid for his sins that have damaged our nation’s trust in government, destroyed the country’s ability to have meaningful dialogue and cemented our nation’s politics as an arena in which winning is the only thing that matters.”

“The fall of Nixon was a triumph for our country. It’s hard to imagine McConnell ever having the guts or the desire to protect the nation like Goldwater, Scott and Rhodes did that day in 1974 when they went to the White House and told Nixon it was over.”

“What he’ll be remembered for is two things that have done lasting damage to the country and its politics.”

“First is his cynical and hypocritical manipulation of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process that over a four-year period shifted the court from a center-right body to a far-right body that overturned 60 years of case law on civil rights and nearly a century of law that empowered Congress to check a president’s power.”

“The man who once boasted that he split with his party in 1964 and voted for Lyndon Johnson because of Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights was the key player in dismantling those rights he stood for as a young man.”

“It seems somehow fitting for the ultimate shape-shifter, who wrote about accompanying Sen. John Sherman Cooper to see Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act into law, that the court he created was the court that struck down the last remaining significant provision.”

“As the court he built chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, McConnell cheered.”

“And it’s not just that he built this court — it’s the hypocritical way he did it.”

“McConnell blocked Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on the court in 2016, saying the American people should decide at the polls who got to make an appointment in the last year of an administration.”

“And then after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, McConnell forced through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just eight days before Trump lost his reelection.”

“McConnell’s shenanigans turned what had been a 5-4 conservative majority — with one member being a reliable swing vote — into a solid 6-3 radical conservative court.”

“In the process, McConnell destroyed the court’s credibility with the American people.”

“But his biggest failing may be his embrace of a president who he believes is stupid and who he believes led an attempt to overthrow the United States’ government on Jan. 6, 2021.

All to protect and increase his own political power.”

“Despite all this, when Trump ran for president in 2024, McConnell continued to support him.

Even when Trump said racist things about McConnell’s wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell continued to bend his knee.”

“And that is the legacy of Mitch McConnell. He ends his career adopting the anti-civil rights positions Barry Goldwater supported, handed to him by a despised and distrusted Supreme Court that he created, but didn’t have an iota of the bravery Goldwater summoned to stand against a criminal and corrupt president.”

“Whew! I’m glad I got that off my chest while he’s still alive.”

All of this absolutely needed to be said, especially in McConnell’s hometown newspaper. His decisions have brought untold harm to the people of the United States and especially to the people of Kentucky. We have a long, brutal fight ahead of us to restore legitimacy to the Supreme Court and break the hold of right-wing extremism on this country.

McConnell will be forever remembered as one of the worst Americans to ever live; a man who dedicated his career to undermining our democracy and entrenching the power of the billionaires at the expense of everyone else, with shocking cruelty and a callous disregard for the needs of working families

 

Knowing what companies to boycott is now a national necessity in order to protect your own health and that of your family! Many thanks to our rogue government and especially the billionaires that have taken it by storm and a special applause for the dork, Elon Musk and his DOGE SQ

9:08 AM · Jul 22, 2026