US senators move to block a Saudi bomb sale. Will the Senate vote by 15 October?
The State Department approved 48 F-35 jets for Saudi Arabia on Thursday. A separate Saudi bomb sale is already inside its 30 days in Congress.
What happened
The Trump administration says it has approved the sale of nearly 50 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, and Congress has 30 days to scrutinise or attempt to block the 24 billion dollar deal.
The State Department said on Thursday that it had cleared the sale of 48 F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia for about 24.3 billion dollars. It called Saudi Arabia a major non-NATO ally and said the sale would not change the military balance in the region.
Congress now has 30 days to look at the deal or try to block it. Within a day a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee came out against the sale, saying it could put American stealth technology within reach of China.
Israel is the only other country in the region that flies the aircraft.
The jet sale has no public start date for its 30 days. The formal notice of the sale to Congress is not on the public record. It is not in the Congressional Record for 14 to or in the Federal Register, so there is no date to count 30 days from.
A second Saudi sale does have a date. A formal notice, called a transmittal, for 10,004 bomb guidance kits and 10,004 general purpose bombs was printed in the Congressional Record on . It is transmittal 26-35, sent under section 36(b)(1) of the Arms Export Control Act.
On the senators Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley filed a resolution, S.J.Res.216, to stop that sale. Counting 30 days from puts the end of the review on .
Any vote in this window will be in the Senate. The House has left Washington, and its leader’s calendar shows no working days before . The midterm elections are six weeks away.
Sources: BBC, Al Jazeera, Text of S.J.Res.216, govinfo
The Pattern
We looked at Gulf arms sales where Congress was formally told of the sale and a senator filed a resolution to block it. We counted the days from that notice to a recorded vote in the Senate. We found eleven since 2016, and five of them got a vote within the 30 days.
Show the other 9 cases
The Read
Start with the clock that can be counted. No formal notice for the F-35 jets has been published, so there is no 30-day period for them yet. The bomb kit sale does have one. Its notice was printed in the Congressional Record on , and the resolution against it names that date in its own text.
History says a vote by is possible but a little less likely than not. The deadline, more than the argument, decides when the Senate votes. Seven of the last eleven Gulf sales got a Senate vote between day 25 and day 35, and five of those came inside the 30 days. The reason is a rule: once Congress is told of a sale, a resolution against it gets a fast track, so one senator can force a vote even if party leaders do not want one. The votes bunch on the deadline or come after the sale has already gone through.
Two things could break the pattern this time, and neither is about Saudi Arabia. The House is away until , so any vote would be a Senate vote taken for the record, six weeks before the midterms. The exact deadline is also up to three days unclear, because the notice reaches Congress before the Congressional Record prints it, so the real end of the review may come slightly before . We could not check the Senate’s sitting calendar for October, and that is the biggest risk to this question.
Disclaimer
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