The Lobby That Will Not Register

The primary in Kentucky's 4th Congressional District is three days away, and by every public accounting it is now the most expensive House primary in the history of the republic — more than twenty-five million dollars in advertising poured into one Republican contest in one Kentucky district. A great deal of that money has come, by way of a Washington super PAC called the United Democracy Project, from an organization whose own publicly stated mission is to persuade the United States government, in its own words, "to enact specific policies that create a strong, enduring and mutually beneficial relationship with our ally Israel." AIPAC says it itself. It puts the sentence on its website. A foreign-policy lobby spending tens of millions to remove an American congressman who votes the wrong way on foreign aid is exactly what it appears to be, and the honest thing is to say so.

The man on the receiving end is Thomas Massie, the Republican from Kentucky's fourth, an MIT-trained engineer who has built the most consistent voting record in Congress against foreign aid of every flavor. He has voted against aid to Ukraine. He has voted against aid to Egypt. He has voted against aid to Israel — including, in 2021, against a billion dollars for the Iron Dome system, the vote that put him on the lobby's map for good. Asked once whether he could be moved to fund one ally if not another, he answered with the bluntness that gets a man into trouble in Washington and out of trouble at home: "What's so hard for you to understand, I'm not for funding any of it." He treats the foreign-aid consensus as the indictment of bipartisanship, not its vindication. You do not have to agree with him on every count to see what a representative is supposed to look like.

He is also one of the very few elected Republicans who has refused to let the Epstein file go. He has called the present executive branch "the Epstein administration." He has said, on the record, that "Donald Trump himself has said that the release of the files are going to hurt his friends in West Palm Beach." That a sitting Republican congressman would name the sitting Republican president in this matter is almost unheard of, and we should not be too tired to notice it.

The money against him is not a secret. The United Democracy Project has dropped roughly $2.6 million into this race. The Republican Jewish Coalition has spent something on the order of $4 million more for his challenger, the Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein. By Massie's own accounting on his campaign account — "AIPAC and closely associated entities have spent over $6 million to influence my election" — and he has said elsewhere that more than ninety percent of the money being spent to defeat him comes from the Israeli lobby. These are not new numbers in kind, only in scale. In 2024, UDP and its allies spent nearly $14.5 million to drive Jamaal Bowman out of New York's 16th, and roughly $9 million to drive Cori Bush out of Missouri's 1st, and afterward they bragged about both. AIPAC's pattern is to fund the defeat of members it judges unreliable on Israel and then claim the scalps on its own channels. It does not deny it. It celebrates it.

Here is where the argument turns. AIPAC is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It says it should not have to be — American-funded, American members, no money from a foreign government — and that argument has held off the Justice Department for sixty years. But the history is not on the lobby's side. In November of 1962, the Justice Department ordered AIPAC's direct predecessor, the American Zionist Council, to register as a foreign agent under FARA, on the finding that the AZC was funded through the Jewish Agency for Israel. The AZC did not comply. Within six weeks, former AZC employees incorporated, in Washington, a new entity called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which took over the AZC's lobbying activities — and the Department of Justice kept the fact of that incorporation, as a structural answer to a FARA demand, out of the public record until 2008, when it was pried loose by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the researcher Grant F. Smith. AIPAC's founding form was, on the documentary record, a legal workaround to a registration demand it understood it could not meet. That is the strongest single argument for registration that exists, and it is the lobby's own paper trail.

This is why, yesterday, Massie introduced the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity Act — the AIPAC Act — and said: "The lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it's a foreign country, whether it's Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel." That is the language of a citizen, not a partisan. It does not single out a people; it singles out a category of foreign interest, of which Israel is one example, and asks that a disclosure law passed by Congress in 1938 be applied evenly. It is the request the Kennedy Justice Department already made of the same lobby in 1962 — the request the lobby's reincorporation in 1963 was designed to escape.

The sovereignty question follows. The voters of Kentucky's 4th District are entitled to choose their own representative. They may want a congressman who votes against foreign aid; many of them clearly do, because it is why he has been their congressman for over a decade. When the deciding margin in a primary in northern Kentucky is supplied by a Washington super PAC organized around the foreign-policy interests of another country, the question of whose preferences are being represented in that seat is no longer a purely domestic one. The formal sovereignty of American foreign policy — the principle that what America does abroad is set by Americans for American interests — becomes, in those circumstances, a polite fiction. Money on this scale, deployed from this direction, does not lobby a congressman; it selects one. And selection, not persuasion, is the verb that ought to trouble us.

There remains the convergence, which is the part of this that should not be hurried past. Massie is being squeezed from two directions at once. From one side, a foreign-policy lobby that wants him gone because he will not vote the consensus on Israel, Ukraine, and Egypt. From the other, a party machinery, and a president personally, who want him quiet because he will not stop talking about Epstein. Both pressures land on the same one congressman in the same one primary in the same one week. That convergence is not coincidence. That is what it looks like when honest representation becomes structurally intolerable to organized power. A republic that finds itself unable to tolerate a single representative who votes his conscience on war abroad and tells the truth about predation at home has not lost an argument. It has lost a habit.

AIPAC is doing in Kentucky exactly what AIPAC was formed to do, and the law that would have required it to say so out loud was answered, in 1963, by reincorporation. We can keep arguing about whether the lobby's effect on our foreign policy is good or bad; that fight is worth having. What we cannot do, in good faith, is pretend the effect is not foreign. The most expensive House primary in American history is being decided, in part, by money raised to advance another country's interests, and the man on the wrong end of it is one of the few in Congress who will say so out loud. Three days from now, Kentucky will vote. The rest of us should at least watch with our eyes open.