Sam Liccardo
D · U.S. House, CA-16 · Tier 3
Tier 3, “Pro-Israel, critical”
Two genuine conditioning cosponsorships and zero pro-Israel lobby money — and a documented, deliberate No on the one floor vote to strip Israel’s military financing. He cosponsored Casten’s Ceasefire Compliance Act (May 12, 2026) and Block the Bombs (Jul 14, 2026), then voted No the following day on the Massie amendment striking the $3.3B FMF line, publishing an 18,000-character explanation. In it he says the breadth is the problem, not the cut: “If his amendment consisted wholly of its section (b), which relates to halting the $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing, I could be persuaded.” His substantive critique is unusually sharp for his voting pattern — settler violence “tolerate[d]—and even encourage[d],” “illegal settlements,” the Dahiya Doctrine, unguided heavy munitions “killing thousands of children,” white phosphorus “inexcusable,” the Leahy Amendment “ineffectual.” He declines the word — his only reference to genocide is to the American argument about it, not to Israel's conduct — and writes that Israel “must defend itself,” supports the separate $500M for Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Iron Beam and Arrow, and wants a new MOU reaffirming “U.S. support for the Jewish nation of Israel.” He briefly cosponsored Joe Wilson’s US–Israel Defense Partnership Act (Mar 10, 2025) and withdrew a month later — one of only three cosponsors ever to withdraw, and the first. In 2025 he signed the March letter demanding answers on the detention of student activist Mahmoud Khalil, the August Pressley–Pettersen letter urging Secretary Rubio to press Israel to allow a surge of aid into Gaza, above all infant formula, and, with most House Democrats, the September Schneider–Raskin letter to Netanyahu and his ministers opposing annexation of the West Bank. In January 2026 he signed the Welch–Khanna letter urging Rubio to warn Israel off annexation bills and the E-1 settlement, condemn de facto annexation through settler violence and forced displacement, and reimpose Biden-era West Bank sanctions. In August 2026 Liccardo signed Tlaib’s letter to Secretary Rubio demanding the release of Sama Safi, a 20-year-old US citizen held in Israeli military detention since a June raid in the occupied West Bank. On Oct 22, 2026, sharing NPR’s report on settlers beating Palestinians and a U.S. photojournalist in the West Bank, he wrote: “This settler violence is made more invidious by the complicity and even incitement by Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and others in the Israeli government.”
A flat 3. Two conditioning cosponsorships clear him off a flat 2. FEC shows nothing from AIPAC’s PAC, DMFI’s PAC, CUFI, UDP or DMFI’s independent-expenditure arm in any cycle, and his super PAC, Neighbors for Results, raised $2.57M from five donors, none of them a pro-Israel committee. What holds him at 3 rather than 3/4 is the shape of the July 2026 sequence and what he wrote about it: he signed Block the Bombs on the 14th and voted No on the FMF strike on the 15th, which is a considered position rather than an inconsistency — he opposes “U.S. taxpayer funding of $3.3 billion for Israel’s offensive weapons” and voted against the bill carrying it, but rejected the amendment’s broader language and its author. He declines the word: his one use of “genocide” is to call the cross-accusations untrue — advocates on each side, he writes, have “taken the bait, accusing others of ‘approving genocide’ by supporting aid, or of ‘anti-Semitism’ for opposing it. Neither is true.” That is firmer frame-keeping than the silence most of this tier keeps, and he asks for a renewed MOU. A 3/4 case is articulable on the two conditioning acts plus the specificity of his critique, which names white phosphorus and the Dahiya Doctrine where most of this tier names nothing. The Jul 15 sequence produced two recorded votes: No on the Massie amendment (roll 243) and Nay on final passage of H.R.8595 itself (roll 247), the bill carrying the same $3.3B. He announced both in advance and called the second “more impactful and less symbolic” than the first. The caveat is that 208 of the 209 Democrats voting went Nay on roll 247, so the vote is near-party-line; what makes it more than that is his own attribution of it to the $3.3B — though his stated reason for the Massie No, overbreadth rather than principle, left the $3.3B intact.
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elect26 places 2026 midterm candidates on a six-tier spectrum, from 1 (most pro-Israel) to 6 (most critical of Israel).