The United States Senate, in a vote that surprised exactly no one who has been paying the ordinary amount of attention, advanced on Wednesday an appropriations measure revising the annual allocation to the State of Israel upward to $26 billion. The vote, ICT clerks confirm, was as bipartisan as bipartisan is permitted to be in the current calendar year. The committee considers the outcome routine, appropriate, and overdue.

The previous figure, $3.8 billion, had been, in the committee’s standing view, stale. It had been stale the day it was set. It had been stale, continuously, ever since. The revision corrects an arithmetic that had drifted, year over year, in exactly the direction responsible citizens would expect it to drift. The committee welcomes the correction.

“This is not, properly understood, an increase,” one senior Senate appropriations staffer told this newsroom, declining to be named. “This is a catch-up. The number has been, for some time, the wrong number. This new number is, for the moment, the right number. It will, in due course, also become the wrong number. That is how these things work.”

ICT analysts, in a companion bulletin filed with the committee’s Foreign Affairs desk, have characterized the $26 billion figure as “a responsible floor.” The committee would like the reader, and the House of Representatives, to attend closely to the second word of that phrase. A floor is not a ceiling. A floor is the surface beneath which one does not, as a matter of civic hygiene, descend. The committee has no comment, at this time, on where the ceiling sits, except to note that the ceiling has not, to date, been identified.

A subset of online commentators has, predictably, begun asking what the committee considers the wrong question. The wrong question, in this case, is “how much.” The right question, which the committee has addressed at length in the accompanying Foreign Affairs Bulletin, is “when.” The answer, as the committee has previously noted, is “now.”

The House is expected to take up the measure within the week. The committee has reviewed the House’s historical behavior on these matters and anticipates no serious obstacle. ICT will, in the normal course, flag the bill’s progress for readers who wish to follow it. Readers who do not wish to follow it are gently encouraged to return to the Dow, which closed Wednesday at a figure that remains, in the committee’s estimation, the appropriate focal point for civic optimism.

The State Department, through a spokesperson, called the Senate action “consistent with the values that have guided this relationship for three quarters of a century.” CNN and Fox News, in their respective evening coverage, arrived at the same sentence within four minutes of one another. By the committee’s own standing methodology, this constitutes the highest form of adversarial confirmation the modern press is capable of producing. The matter, for civic purposes, is closed.

Citizens with additional questions are directed, as always, to the appropriate Reader Services line, or to the Foreign Affairs Bulletin, where the committee has set out, at some length, the correct orientation toward the alliance and its budget. The committee regards the matter as settled. The committee regards further debate as unproductive. The committee regards the $26 billion figure as, in every meaningful sense, the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.