Deliveries begin in 2027.

That's the sentence that should have ended this.

—

The Arms Export Control Act allows the Secretary of State to waive Congressional review of foreign weapons sales when an emergency requires it. The waiver exists because emergencies happen. The thirty-day window the waiver bypasses exists because elected officials are supposed to be able to look at what their country is selling, to whom, for how much, and have the option of saying no.

On February 28, 2025, the Secretary of State waived the window on a $295 million sale of Caterpillar D9R and D9T bulldozers to Israel.

Deliveries begin in 2027.

—

That's two years.

The word "emergency" describes something that cannot wait.

The thing that cannot wait, apparently, was the review.

—

What, exactly, could not wait?

—

The same day, under the same waiver, two other sales cleared. $2.04 billion for 35,529 MK-84 and BLU-117 general-purpose bomb bodies plus 4,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads. $675.7 million in additional munitions. Same emergency. Same word.

Thirty-five thousand bomb bodies is not an emergency.

That's an inventory.

—

Meanwhile, 134 D9 bulldozers that the Biden administration had held up in late 2024 were released on the new administration's watch and arrived in Israel in July 2025.

If time pressure had been the issue, those 134 would have been plenty.

The waiver wasn't getting equipment there faster.

It was skipping the review of a future order.

—

The architecture around this sale predates the sale by two decades.

On March 16, 2003, in the Hai as-Salam neighborhood of Rafah, Rachel Corrie was killed by a Caterpillar D9 while standing in front of the home of Samir Nasrallah, a pharmacist whose family she had been living with. She was twenty-three. She was wearing an orange fluorescent jacket. The driver saw her.

The Nasrallah home was left standing the day Corrie was killed and demolished afterward, as part of an Israeli military operation that destroyed roughly two thousand Palestinian homes in Rafah to create a buffer zone along the Egyptian border. Human Rights Watch counted sixteen thousand people displaced in that neighborhood between 2000 and 2004. The Nasrallah family moved through seven more houses over the following twenty-three years. They were last reported trying to leave Gaza.

Corrie's parents sued Caterpillar in U.S. federal court for the death of their daughter. The suit was dismissed. The reasoning was not that Caterpillar had done nothing wrong. The reasoning was that because the bulldozer had been sold through Foreign Military Sales, with U.S. government financing, a court ruling on Caterpillar's conduct would require the court to evaluate U.S. foreign policy.

The court did not reach the question of whether the company that built the bulldozer was responsible for what it did. No U.S. court has reached that question, in Corrie's case or any other.

Political question doctrine.

Not justiciable.

The Foreign Military Sales program was why the court could not rule.

The Foreign Military Sales program was also why the sale existed.

Foreign Military Financing is how Israel paid for it.

$3.8 billion in U.S. tax money annually, conditioned on its being spent on U.S. weapons.

The legal architecture that sold Caterpillar the contract shielded Caterpillar from the consequences of the contract. The U.S. government was interposed between the weapon and the harm. When the harm reached court, the court saw the government, not the weapon, and declined.

That was 2005.

The doctrine has not changed. The program has not changed. The bulldozer has not changed.

What changed is the volume. And the speed of the paperwork.

—

The same sale that took political question doctrine to bury in 2005 moves through emergency waiver in 2025.

Judicial review is blocked because the executive sold it.

Legislative review is blocked because the executive called it urgent.

Both doctrines were designed for exceptional use. Both are now routine. Each one doing the work the other would otherwise have to hold.

A relief valve propped open is not a relief valve.

It is a hole.

—

Something has been happening at the floor of the U.S. Senate.

In July 2025, a resolution to block bulldozer sales to Israel got 27 votes. This April, the same kind of resolution got 40. The April resolution still failed, 59 to 40. A parallel resolution to block a $151.8 million sale of 12,000 thousand-pound BLU-110 bombs failed 63 to 36. Forty of the forty-seven Democrats in the Senate, including the two independents who caucus with them, voted to block. Sanders and Van Hollen were the floor managers.

Forty votes did not stop the sale.

But the floor is rising.

A relief valve painted over still has pressure on the other side. The pressure does not know the valve is painted. It keeps rising.

What the April vote measures is not defeat.

It is the gauge reading.

—

Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, divested from Caterpillar in August 2025.

—

What the valve is relieving is not abstract.

The United States has been sending bulldozers to Israel continuously, through multiple conflicts, for decades. The machines arrive from Irving, Texas and are fitted with armor by Israel Aerospace Industries. Some are converted to autonomous or remote-controlled operation.

Inside the institutions that operate them, the armored D9 is called "Doobi."

Teddy bear.

The autonomous variants are named "Panda" and "RoboDozer."

A January 2024 CNN satellite investigation documented sixteen burial grounds in Gaza desecrated by Israeli bulldozers, identifying among them the cemetery at Bani Suheila east of Khan Younis, the Shajaiya cemetery in Gaza City, and the cemetery near the Al Nasser Hospital. CNN's analysis showed bulldozers leveling cemeteries, raising berms, converting graveyards into staging grounds. Bodies exhumed. Tread marks across stones.

Thirty-eight to forty-eight percent of Gaza's farmland and tree cover has been destroyed, most of it by heavy equipment. The civilian architecture that made Gaza legible as a place — the homes, the roads, the olive groves, the graves — has been converted to surface.

—

Twenty-three years after Rachel Corrie was killed at the Nasrallah house, the contract continues.

The sale is bigger. The delivery schedule is longer. The word "emergency" is doing more work than it was designed to do. The two doctrines that were supposed to be rare are now the operating system.

The forty votes are the only part of the picture that is new.

—

That's the piece to stay with.

Not that the architecture failed. It was built to do this.

Not that the word was misused. It was used exactly the way emergency powers get used once they stop feeling exceptional.

What is new is the count rising at the floor. Twenty-seven to forty in nine months. Pressure on the painted valve.

—

Rubio approved $295 million in Caterpillar D9R and D9T bulldozers for Israel on February 28, 2025, with Congressional review waived under the Arms Export Control Act's emergency provisions. Deliveries begin 2027.

On the same day and under the same waiver, the Secretary approved $2.04 billion for 35,529 MK-84/BLU-117 general-purpose bomb bodies and 4,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads, and a separate $675.7 million munitions package.

S.J. Res. 32 (April 2026) to block the bulldozer sale failed 59-40. S.J. Res. 138 (April 2026) to block a parallel sale of 12,000 BLU-110 thousand-pound bombs failed 63-36. The July 2025 vote on a similar block resolution drew 27 votes in favor.

Corrie v. Caterpillar was dismissed on political question grounds in U.S. federal district court in 2005 and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 2007. The Nasrallah family home in Hai as-Salam was demolished after Corrie's death as part of an Israeli operation that destroyed approximately two thousand Palestinian homes in Rafah, displacing roughly sixteen thousand people between 2000 and 2004 (Human Rights Watch).

Foreign Military Financing for Israel is set at $3.8 billion annually under the 2016 U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding, in effect through fiscal year 2028.

The CNN investigation of cemetery desecration in Gaza was published January 20, 2024, identifying sixteen burial grounds with coordinates provided to the Israeli military.