Why foreign-lobby money compromises America First

The America First category, question 4

Every candidate audited by RESOLUTE Citizen is scored against five questions in the America First category. Question 4 is the one this methodology page exists to support:

The wording was settled before any of these adjustments existed — the question was written into the scorecard methodology because a candidate cannot serve American voters and a foreign-government policy filter at the same time. The dollar-bracket adjustment system in the right-hand column of every profile page documents which candidates the question applies to, with the actual numbers from primary-source filings.

Why this isn't anti-Israel — it's pro-America

RESOLUTE Citizen scores candidates against an explicitly Christian, Reformed, America-First framework. That framework does not require hostility toward Israel as a nation; it requires that no foreign government's policy agenda be permitted to override the duty an American official owes to American constituents. The reason AIPAC dollars are flagged is structural, not sectarian:

1. Israel is not a formal U.S. mutual-defense ally

The United States has no treaty of mutual defense with Israel. Israel is not a NATO member. It is not bound by a Status of Forces Agreement requiring U.S. defense in the event of attack on Israel, nor is the U.S. bound by Israel to defend it. The standard term used in U.S. State Department documents is "Major Non-NATO Ally" — a status that grants Israel preferential access to military procurement and joint training, but explicitly does not obligate either country to enter the other's wars. Israel operates independently as a regional nuclear power and routinely takes military, intelligence, and diplomatic actions against U.S. interests (the Pollard espionage case, the USS Liberty attack, ongoing technology-transfer disputes, and the more recent Pegasus spyware deployments against U.S. officials and journalists).

This is a factual claim about treaty status, sourced to the public record. A reader who wishes to verify it can consult State.gov's bilateral-relations page, the Congressional Research Service reports on U.S.-Israel relations, or the Federation of American Scientists archive.

2. AIPAC operates a super-PAC that spends nine figures to elect or defeat U.S. candidates

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is registered as a domestic 501(c)(4) and is not required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Its political arm — the United Democracy Project (UDP) super-PAC — spent over $100 million during the 2024 election cycle, the bulk of it on independent expenditures against candidates who had publicly criticized Israeli government policy. The single largest target was former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), against whom UDP spent roughly $14.5 million in support of his primary challenger George Latimer. UDP outspent the second-largest pro-Israel-lobby PAC by a factor of nearly four-to-one in 2024.

That money is the substance of America First q4. A candidate who has accepted millions in support from a PAC that exists specifically to defeat critics of a foreign government has, by their own revealed preference, accepted a foreign-policy filter on their congressional vote. The candidate may sincerely believe they support American interests; the bracket-based penalty in this scoring system reflects only the documented dollar magnitude of the alignment, not anyone's reading of their internal motives.

3. The same logic applies to China-linked donors

Federal election law (52 U.S.C. § 30121) prohibits foreign nationals — including Chinese Communist Party members — from contributing to U.S. campaigns. Most documented CCP-member donors hold green cards rather than U.S. citizenship, raising legal questions that have so far gone unprosecuted. RESOLUTE Citizen tracks publicly documented donations from individuals identified as CCP members in Chinese state media or in their employer's own annual reports (Wanxiang Group's 2025 report named CEO Pin Ni as an "outstanding Communist Party member" for the fifteenth time), and applies the same dollar-bracket penalty to recipients. Sources for every China-linked entry are linked directly on the affected candidate's profile.

4. The Soros network triggers Economic Stewardship (WEF/ESG capture), not the foreign-lobby category

George Soros is a naturalized American citizen, so his Open Society Foundations and Democracy PAC vehicles are not technically foreign-lobby instruments. RESOLUTE Citizen tracks them under a different question: Economic Stewardship q5, which asks whether the candidate "opposes WEF/ESG/Davos economic capture and supports anti-trust action against monopolistic financial cartels." Soros is a founding World Economic Forum participant and the Open Society Foundations are one of the WEF's largest civil-society partners — a candidate who has accepted Soros-network money has, by their own revealed preference, accepted funding from the architect of the very capture regime the question asks them to oppose. The same network is documented to fund the Fair and Just Prosecution cohort of progressive district attorneys (Bragg, Gascón, Foxx, Krasner, Gardner) who decline to prosecute attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and selectively refuse to enforce state abortion restrictions; that pattern is tracked separately as Sanctity-of-Life claim evidence on the affected candidates, but the headline scoring trigger is the WEF/ESG question.

The scoring impact, visible in two places

For every candidate with a documented donor entry on a tracked network, two things happen:

1. The specific category question is marked False. For AIPAC and China money, that's foreign_policy_restraint[q4] — the foreign-lobby question. For Soros funding, that's economic_stewardship[q5] — the WEF/ESG/Davos capture question. The per-category subscore drops by 2 points and the cell is annotated with an answer-level footnote pointing at the donor record.
2. An additional dollar-bracket adjustment is applied to the total. This makes the scoring proportional to the magnitude of the documented funding. A candidate at $20,000 takes a different hit than a candidate at $20 million.

Both impacts are documented on the candidate's profile page in a "Score adjustments" card with explicit dollar amounts, brackets, sources, and Wayback-archive links so the citation is recoverable even if the original page disappears.

The bracket schedules

AIPAC / pro-Israel-lobby — career-total contributions from FEC + OpenSecrets via TrackAIPAC

Source: trackaipac.com/congress (which aggregates FEC + OpenSecrets data into per-Congress-member records).

China-linked — Pin Ni / Wanxiang, Dominic Ng / East West Bank, United Front Work Department-affiliated donors

Sources: Washington Examiner, Free Beacon, Newsweek investigative reporting + FEC.gov direct queries. The China bracket schedule is heavier than AIPAC because federal law prohibits CCP members from contributing, raising legal questions in addition to policy-capture concerns.

Soros / Open Society — Democracy PAC, Color of Change, Fair and Just Prosecution funding

Sources: FEC, OpenSecrets, Fair and Just Prosecution membership records, Color of Change PAC filings.

Methodology data on GitHub

The bracket schedules, the donor data, and every script that applies them are open source on GitHub:

• data/aipac_full.json — 486 Members of Congress with TrackAIPAC career totals
• data/china_adjustments.json — China-linked donor seed records with FEC + investigative-reporting sources
• data/soros_adjustments.json — Soros prosecutor seed records
• apply-foreign-lobby-to-category.py — the script that flips america_first/q4 + life/q4 on every recipient

If you see an entry you believe is wrong

RESOLUTE Citizen is a public, source-cited audit, not an enforcement action. Every flipped answer is reversible if the donor record turns out to be incorrect. If you have documented evidence that a candidate's TrackAIPAC, FEC, or investigative-reporting record is wrong, please submit it via the Submit-a-Tip form on the main RESOLUTE Citizen page. Include the source URL and the specific dollar figure or attribution you dispute.