Progressive Dems slam leadership bid to ‘slip’ Iron Dome funding into budget bill

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Progressive Democrats who pushed party leadership to remove $1 billion in emergency Iron Dome missile defense system funding on Wednesday explained their opposition as an issue with the process, decrying leadership for attempting to ‘slip’ the Israeli military aid into non-related legislation.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told CNN that “the entire conversation around the debt limit and the continuing resolution was about those two things. You have a very narrow margin in the House, and somebody in our leadership made the decision to put this Iron Dome in literally six hours before the bill was going to be released,” she continued.

“That just isn’t the way things work around here, there was no discussion about it. No discussion of something completely different from what everyone in the caucus was focused on,” she added.

Jayapal was one of the progressive Democrats to pressure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to remove the provision from the stopgap funding bill, before it was moved to the annual defense bill as a compromise. Following outrage from pro-Israel Democrats, Hoyer announced that the Iron Dome aid would be voted on as a stand-alone bill this week.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, another progressive who was opposed to the Iron Dome funding’s inclusion in the stopgap echoed Jayapal’s comments that the issue was more about the process than the funding itself. “The problem is leadership [will] just throw something on our table, give us about five minutes to decide what we’re going to do and then try to move forward with it,” he said.

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Despite the outrage, none of the progressives who opposed the inclusion of the Iron Dome funding in the spending bill have vocally pushed against the emergency aid itself, at least for now. Sources familiar with the matter decried the leadership’s effort to attach the funding to the spending bill in the first place, saying that including it there as opposed to the annual defense bill was an effort to coerce progressives into voting for the Iron Dome funding due to its razor-thin margins of support.