Genocide lawsuits against Democrats foreshadow 2026 primary challenges

More than 800 Americans in Northern California have now joined in a class-action lawsuit against their Democratic congressional representatives, charging them with illegally helping to provide weapons to Israel for use in committing genocide in Gaza. News of the suit has caused a stir in the Bay Area, with media coverage putting the pair, Rep. Jared Huffman and Rep. Mike Thompson, on the defensive.

Legal experts may be correct that the suit is destined to be thrown out of court. The judicial branch has rarely been willing to interfere with the foreign policy decisions of the legislative or executive branch, and issues like legal standing and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause have routinely shielded legislators. But harping on the steep uphill climb for the lawsuit — and others like it now being prepared by plaintiffs elsewhere in the country — misses the political point.

I decided to join the lawsuit as a plaintiff and to help publicize it because I think that even if the action loses in court, it will win in public discourse. And that will, justifiably, make the congressional defendants the losers.

Like other plaintiffs in the Northern California case, I believe that our lawsuit is on solid ground of justice. The arms shipments to Israel’s military have violated the Constitution, the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and U.S. federal laws — including the Leahy law, which prohibits the government from “using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.” The namesake of the law, former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), says it is being violated.

In effect, by enabling approval of $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel last spring, 366 members of the House voted to force constituents into being complicit in genocide. No amount of rhetoric can change that overarching reality. And no amount of legalistic arguments will deflect the profound effects that moral revulsion can have on politics.

Before the winter ends, dozens of members of Congress, mostly Democrats, are likely to be facing class-action lawsuits from constituents accusing them of illegal and immoral complicity in genocide. Such lawsuits promise to spotlight what many of those lawmakers would much prefer to keep in the shadows.

Legalistic issues of standing and the like avoid far deeper questions. Anyone who contends that the federal court system is immune from an era’s politics might want to ponder the difference between the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson and its 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Drawing media attention to congressional votes for massive arms shipments to Israel will expose lawmakers who staked out positions opposed by the majority of voters. While the defendants may triumph legally, victory will tend to be Pyrrhic — winning in federal court, but losing in the court of public opinion.

What’s more, as with the lawsuit against Huffman and Thompson, the plaintiffs will be largely organized by congressional district while pursuing community outreach strategies — a potentially ominous prospect for politicians seeking reelection. Liberal members of the House who have voted to arm Israel’s military would be wise to recall that entrenched liberal Democrats like former Reps. Eliot Engel, Michael Capuano and Joseph Crowley have fallen to primary challengers who were in part propelled by antiwar sentiment.

Incumbents can easily become so preoccupied with the touted pragmatism of conventional political wisdom that they don’t realize how much the Capitol Hill bubble has insulated them from the moral passions emerging with political force back home. No one now in Congress is in more danger of a primary upset next year than Democrats in blue districts who pay more attention to mainstream punditry and the herd behavior of their peers than to the anguish and anger of their constituents whose pleas to help stop the war in Gaza have fallen on deaf ears.

Most House Democrats — including a majority of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — have stonewalled such pleas, causing many voters to believe that their representatives have a fortress mentality enabling atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Few members of Congress, even from the most liberal districts, have been willing to publicly affirm the conclusions reached by widely respected human rights organizations that Israel has been engaging in genocide.

Last month, Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity” — with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians,” engaging in “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention.” Weeks later, Human Rights Watch released new findings that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide.”

Few politicians up for reelection want to face a homegrown debate about whether they have aided and abetted genocide. Lawsuits such as the one filed in Northern California will make these debates part of the 2026 midterm election.

Norman Solomon is cofounder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” was published in 2023.

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