1. United States
2. Mo.
3. Letter

I am writing as a constituent to state plainly: you must vote NO on H.R. 8800, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027, in its current form. This is not a request for consideration. This is a demand that you reject a bill built on a tactic that has no place in how this country is governed, and on a provision that has no place in our military policy at all. First, the SAVE America Act has no business being anywhere near a defense bill. House Republicans admitted this openly: they attached it to the NDAA specifically because it could not pass on its own, and because holding a must-pass military funding bill hostage was the only way to force it through. That is not legislating. That is hostage-taking with our armed forces' funding as the ransom. If the SAVE America Act cannot survive a clean, standalone vote in the Senate, and your own majority leader has said it does not currently have the votes to defeat a filibuster, then it does not deserve to become law by being smuggled inside a bill that funds troop pay and equipment. I am asking you to reject this tactic outright, regardless of what you think of voter ID policy on its own merits, because tomorrow it will be a different unpopular bill hidden inside a different must-pass vehicle, and the pattern itself has to stop somewhere. Second, and this is the part I need you to hear most clearly: I do not want my country's military permanently intertwined with Israel's through Section 219 of this bill. This provision creates a permanent initiative expanding U.S.-Israel military technology integration and cooperation. Even members of your own chamber, including Representative Thomas Massie, have called this arrangement lopsided in Israel's favor and warned it could compromise American sovereignty and our own national security. I did not elect anyone to permanently fuse our defense technology infrastructure with a foreign military, especially not through a provision attached to a bill most Americans will never read the fine print of. Support for a security partnership is one thing. A permanent, structural integration of our military technology systems with another country's armed forces is something else entirely, and it deserves its own standalone debate and its own standalone vote, not a rider buried in a trillion-dollar defense package. Third, this same bill bundles roughly $73 billion for operations tied to Iran, plus an additional $12 billion, without the kind of separate accountability and oversight that funding for an active military posture toward another country deserves. Wrapping war-related spending, foreign military integration, and domestic voter law changes into a single up-or-down vote is designed to make it politically costly to oppose any one part of it. I refuse to reward that strategy with my silence. I am demanding that you directly: vote NO on H.R. 8800 as it currently stands. If the Senate wants to pass a defense authorization bill, strip the SAVE America Act and Section 219 out of it first, and let each stand or fall on its own. My vote will reflect how you respond to this demand.