The budget reconciliation bill has passed the House of Representatives in a 216-214 vote, authorizing spending for government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of War. The bill also contains the SAVE America Act, a key legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter identification to cast a ballot. Reps. Thomas Massie, R- Ky., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, voted against the legislation. “Safeguarding American elections and strengthening our national defense are the most basic responsibilities of Congress and are supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans,” Johnson previously wrote in a statement. The text, which was finalized by House leadership, the House Budget Committee, and White House, aims to enact aspects of the SAVE America Act and provide supplemental funding to strengthen and defend the American homeland. The House GOP budget resolution instructs four committees to write reconciliation legislation: the House Administration Committee, at $10 billion for SAVE America; the House Armed Services Committee, at $60 billion; the House Intelligence Committee, at $13 billion, both for defense and Iran spending; and the House Agriculture Committee, at $12 billion for farmers. House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., slammed the budget ahead of the vote during his opposing remarks on the House floor. “I rise today in strong opposition to this America Last Republican budget that will provide billions of additional dollars to Operation Epic Fury in the Middle East, which has been a complete and total disaster for the American people,” Jeffries said. “Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in Iran has skyrocketed gas prices on everyday Americans who are already suffering from the failed Republican economy and drowning in its poor management. “Donald Trump and his violent mass deportation machine are spending billions of dollars for ICE to brutalize and kill American citizens or to violently target law-abiding immigrants,” he added. Staunch supporters of the president, who voted in favor of the bill, celebrated the legislation’s passage, and are now calling on the Senate to get the bill across the finish line. “As the budget reconciliation process moves forward, we must ensure all pieces of the House-passed SAVE America Act remain intact and work toward including significant offsets,” Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., told the Daily Signal. “The American people are counting on us to rescue our Republic by bolstering election integrity. Republicans can deliver this feat through budget reconciliation if we have the will to fight.” “My House Freedom Caucus colleagues and I are ready to do just that, and I encourage our Republican colleagues in both chambers to join us without delay,” Clyde continued. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added, “The House has done our job in getting the framework for the SAVE America Act and crucial military funding passed and sent to the Senate. Leader [John] Thune is now the only obstacle between free, fair elections and a stronger military to defend our nation. I encourage the Senate to pass this legislation as soon as possible and give the American people what they have been asking for.” The Daily Signal has reached out to Sen. Thune’s office for comment, but as of publication time, has not received a response.

The University of Texas at Dallas Police Department currently uses Flock safety technology to capture evidence of crimes committed on campus. However, the department says it does not use the system for immigration enforcement. According to the university’s Flock transparency portal, the technology is used to provide “objective evidence without compromising on individual privacy.” The portal also states that the university police department “utilizes real time alerting of hotlist vehicles to capture wanted criminals.” The Flock camera system does not use facial recognition or identify people by gender or race. The university also states the cameras are not used for immigration or traffic enforcement. Campus police say the automatic license plate reader system alerts officers when a vehicle associated with criminal activity enters the campus, including vehicles linked to felony warrants, reported stolen vehicles, or suspect vehicles identified in a criminal investigation.  Although the system can alert officers to vehicles associated with criminal investigations, the university’s transparency policy states it is not used for immigration enforcement. Federal law distinguishes between civil immigration violations and criminal immigration offenses, some of which carry felony penalties. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1325, a person who enters or attempts to enter the United States at a location other than a designated port of entry, evades inspection, or uses fraud or false representation to gain entry commits a federal offense. Depending on the circumstances, repeat offenses or other immigration-related violations can carry felony penalties. By contrast, overstaying a visa is generally considered a civil immigration violation rather than a criminal offense. Individuals who remain unlawfully in the country may be subject to arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and removal proceedings. According to the transparency portal, the university’s Flock system shares its data with several city and county law enforcement agencies, as well as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the 1st Judicial District, the 47th District Attorney’s Office of Texas, and the Kleberg County Attorney’s Task Force. The university does not share data with the Texas Attorney General’s office. Texas public universities and their police departments are not required to report the immigration status of students enrolled. However, they are prohibited from adopting “sanctuary” policies for illegal aliens and must comply with federal immigration detainer requests.  Additionally, a 2025 directive from the Department of Homeland Security states that colleges and universities are no longer exempt from immigration enforcement activities.  Separately, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also ordered the city of Conroe to release records from its Flock camera system after the city attempted to withhold them from a resident. The Texas Department of Public Safety declined to comment on the issue, and the University of Texas at Dallas Police Department and the Office of the Texas Attorney General did not respond to a request for comment.

Wayne National Forest, located in southeast Ohio, will likely see fracking opportunities thanks to a lease sale recently announced by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. According to Signal Ohio, the lease sale scheduled for Sept. 15 includes 41 parcels of land totaling 2,840 acres. The BLM announcement makes it that much more likely that the lease sale will make fracking available in the state’s only national forest for the first time, though “some bureaucratic hurdles remain.” In order to drill at Wayne National Forest, the winning bidder would need a BLM permit. The report also notes an effort’s been underway since at least 2016 to bring fracking to the forest. Meanwhile, other parts of the state have already introduced fracking and those efforts are expanding. Ohio has opened approximately 22,000 acres to oil and gas companies since 2024, Signal Ohio mentioned, thanks to House Bill 507, signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in January 2023. That bill required the state to open up land, including state parks, for such development. According to a Signal Akron report at the start of this month, the ensuing fracking has generated $314 million for the state. A March 30 Signal Ohio report delves into the revenue stream for the state from opening up 6,600 acres of Salt Fork State Park, what was then the largest project unanimously approved by the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission. “The company agreed to pay a $58 million signing bonus and 20% of future production revenue,” the report mentioned. “At least 30% of revenue from any lease agreement must flow back into the state park or wildlife area at issue. The rest goes to Ohio’s general revenue fund.” Less than a month ago, the commission also approved 21 bids covering 15,000 acres of land, per a report from the Ohio Capital Journal. Most are part of the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area. Fracking also comes into play with the Marcellus Shale, a unit of sedimentary rock whose western portions are in eastern Ohio. Rep. Troy Balderson, R-Ohio, whose district includes a portion of the Marcellus Shale, has promoted the “boom” that it helped create, including in February while speaking to Victor Davis Hanson’s co-host, Jack Fowler. A public comment period regarding the BLM announcement for Wayne National Forest is open until Aug. 17, 2026.

The following is an excerpt of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, for “Signal Sitdown,” which premieres on the Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EDT on July 23. This transcript has been edited for clarity. Bradley Devlin: You just came out with a letter outlining 14 different items that you want to see done before we get to the midterms. We got this majority. It was a Republican trifecta. It happens rarely in history. Don’t waste it. And so, first and foremost, I want to ask you a little bit about your background and your experience on the Hill. Why is this moment so important? What, in your experience, has made you feel that way?   Rep. Chip Roy: I’ve spent too many years in Washington.  That’s what you’re saying. That’s code for being here too much. But, yeah, I was a lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was Sen. [Ted] Cruz’s chief of staff. I’ve now been in Congress for going on eight years. And so, I know the town pretty well. And you have these brief moments where you have opportunity.  And it’s not just the trifecta, but even that is itself rare, as you just described historically, but it is also having a president willing to act. We have one. An administration filled with doers and people who understand the town and get a lot of stuff done, like my good friend Russ Vought at [the Office of Management and Budget] and others.  That’s rare. And a Congress that has some people who are of substance that are in the fight and know what we need to do, and we’ve got that moment. But that’s coinciding with a critical moment for the nation. And there are so many things hanging in the balance. And if we don’t act with this moment, then we risk losing the country and losing things every second that goes by.  We’re watching [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani. We’re watching the march of Islam across Texas. We’re watching the still-considered efforts by illegals here to avoid the law and to stay in this country illegally, and more to keep coming.  We’re watching the continued expansion of the surveillance state and corporate America and AI advancement, and some of those things are good, and some of those things are concerning.  I could keep going down the list, but all of these things add up to a pivotal moment in history where we’ve got the right moment. Let’s take advantage of it.  We’ve done some good things in 18 months, but we haven’t done enough. And we’ve got six months left in this Congress. Let’s go finish the job, regardless of what happens in November.  I think when you do that, you win. That’s my experience, to put a finer point on it. When you lead, you win. When you play prevent defense, to use a football analogy, I think you start losing. I think we’re playing … I think we’re risking right now playing prevent defense.  I think we need to be on offense. The president’s instincts reflect that. The president’s always on offense. I think we need to be, too.  If you go back two years and you go to what worked for the president and, responding to Biden and the president was on offense and Congress was drafting in behind the president’s campaign, and we were given a mandate very clearly on the border.  And the president has honored that mandate. And that’s why one of the major things I think we need to address is codifying what the president has done on the border, which is reflected, as you pointed out, in the previous Congress’ HR 2, which is now something we are marking up next week after a pretty extensive battle on the House floor yesterday.  We’re now going to be moving that legislation, a new form of it, slightly tweaked, but basically that legislation through Judiciary Committee next week. To answer your question, as I mentioned before on prevent defense, the typical view in this town is you got to start thinking about everything through the electoral lens.  You can’t be stupid about that. And look, there are a lot of smart political minds in the White House and around the country that need to figure out and address different issues for our different members, and we’re aware of that. But we ran on securing the border.  We campaigned on that. Let’s go do that.  Devlin: You mentioned a prolonged fight on the House floor. This culminated yesterday. We are recording this on July 15th.  Tell us about this fight over getting a vote on HR 2. I’m old enough to remember when I was covering Congress in the last administration, and you guys were gearing up for the 2024 election, and it was “HR 2, HR 2, HR 2” all day long. Everybody wanted to do it.  Explain to me, why is it so hard to get a vote on the key piece of legislation that you guys were using to counter-message the Biden administration’s migration policy? Take us inside this fight. When does it start and where is it heading?   Roy: Sure. And I apologize for time stamping this thing, but you know what? This is what we do in Congress and we have a job to do to finish this. And there’s a debate that’s been underway about whether or not to go back and revisit what we did in the previous Congress, because as I said before, the president has been doing such a phenomenal job and mostly stopped the flow.  The president’s instincts are correct. Finish the mission. Do the mission the correct way, but finish the mission.  Keep on the mission. Our mission at Border Patrol and as Congress and as this government is to secure the borders of the United States, to protect the people of this country. Do it. Carry out the mission and message that to the people unapologetically. Our mission in Congress should be to codify these things.  We know that the laws were being exploited, and they were being done so purposely by the radical left in a way that was destroying the culture of this country, bringing people into our country who are dangerous.  So, let’s codify that so that we … You can’t eliminate it, but you can limit and massively change the ability of a future administration to abuse asylum, parole, catch and release, unaccompanied children, etc.  And we can do that, and we can do it right now. And by the way, that bill still preserves parole in a one-off situation on a case-by-case basis, still preserves asylum for people who meet credible fear, but we define it so that it can’t be abused or it can’t be abused as easily. But this is one issue, right?  This is one issue of finishing the job. SAVE America is another one I’m the lead author of the SAVE America Act.   Devlin: Parallel stories here, right? You have, over and over again, folks in the Republican camp promising conservatives, the conservative base, the people who voted for Trump on the immigration issue, that they will have votes on HR 2.  And finally, we might actually get that after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Same thing with SAVE America. The sticky wicket, of course, is the Senate. But we can’t figure out how to get Republicans to go forward with the second most important issue, which is election integrity.  Roy: And this to your point about and responding to your question about the HR 2 procedures in the House and, like, how we got this stuff done or how we’re moving forward, there was a resistance to doing it by a small quarter of the conference who I think are over-analyzing the political stuff as opposed to the larger message of doing our job and messaging it straight up to the American people.  So, we forced that question. That’s just the bottom line. We held up rules. We said we’re not going to move forward on certain appropriations bills and other things that were important that we all want to figure out how to move forward unless we finish the job and address… and by the way, I had a list of things, HR 2, birthright citizenship, sanctuary cities, all of those things we need to do.  I said, “Give us some of it, one of it, more of it.” So, HR 2, we’re going to move through committee. I hope we’ll move birthright. I hope we will move sanctuary cities, maybe some more. SAVE America, we’re trying to use the reconciliation process to break the back of the Senate to see if we can get the SAVE America Act through.  Tough sledding, right? We’ve passed it three times. The Senate is hung up on its 60-vote threshold, which is a fake threshold.   And I say that as someone who understands the Senate, as we’ve already talked about, as a former lawyer in the Senate, as someone who was the chief of staff to Ted Cruz.  I know Senate procedures better than, frankly, probably most senators because they don’t use them anymore. I’m actually being serious. We used to actually use the Senate rules and do stuff. Right now, they are the personnel arm for the White House, and effectively they pass a few appropriations bills.  That’s it. What else does the Senate do? So, we need to work and try to jam that through and force it through and get the Senate to break and to acknowledge that there should be some at least exceptions, talking filibusters.  Maybe you have a 51-vote threshold when you have a shutdown on a CR. Maybe you should move something like SAVE on reconciliation at 51 votes and allow that and give some flexibility on the parliamentarian to move it.  So, that’s what we’re working through right now. And then there’s the issues broadly speaking on Islam, and I introduced the PAUSE Act last fall in response to birthright citizenship. Maybe we should be pausing immigration, reforming H-1Bs, which are just rampant with fraud. So, there’s a whole arc to all of this.  I haven’t told leadership or the White House it’s my way or the highway, we must do all of these things. What I’m saying is these are the kinds of things we campaigned on. Let’s deliver on SAVE America to the extent we can. Let’s move things like H.R.2 and birthright out of the House, even if the Senate won’t, because then we’ve sent a message to House, the people’s House, are fighting for them.  Devlin: Yeah, I’ve likened the Trump 2024 vote to somebody choosing crystal meth. They chose Donald Trump because they wanted the hardest-core version of the MAGA movement that you could possibly think of. And that, I think, is encapsulated in a piece of legislation like HR 2. That is encapsulated in something like the SAVE America Act. You mentioned this freeze that conservatives in the House put on the floor. It lasted for about three weeks.   Those who are critiquing the conservatives’ insistence to get HR 2 a vote on the floor say, “You guys complain that we’re not doing anything? You guys are the ones who shut down the floor.”  Explain to me the decision to shut down the floor. Why do you think it was necessary? And, from my perspective, it’s you weren’t going to do anything else anyway.  Roy: It’s the only thing that the town responds to, is what I call legislative violence.  Because otherwise they’re just going to do what they do. It’s they get in a room, they tell you all the reasons we can’t do something that’s actually transformative or newsworthy or useful. And then they go through the motions to pass some appropriations bill that spends more money or will move forward a bill like the housing bill, OK?  The housing bill has some good pieces in it. French Hill’s a friend. There’s some good stuff. There’s also a lot of lousy stuff. Section 8 expansion, a whole lot of programs in there that have made Elizabeth Warren and Rashida Tlaib happy. I don’t need to even look at the bill to know if those two are happy, I probably got a concern with the bill.  Yeah. So, we’ve got a bill that was moving forward that a lot of us opposed. We made clear we opposed it. We forced us to vote no on a housing bill. Now we got to go explain to our constituents and everybody why we voted no on the housing bill. They go, “Why are you trashing our bill?” I got to explain to my constituents why I voted no on this bill.  And so, they’re like, “Oh, OK.”  So, at some point you go through and say, “Look, guys, what we’re saying is every once in a while, put something on the floor that, yeah, some of your moderates may not love, but that we’re going to be able to use to exercise the base and get people excited and move forward.  “By the way, all stuff that we believe are well-supported by the lion’s share of the American people.”  So, our view was, what are we slowing down here? You want to move an NDAA that in my opinion had some flaws in it. You want to move an appropriations bill and move appropriations bills forward without any strategy right now on how we’re going to manage a shutdown fight in September.  You want to move the housing bill, which we thought was garbage. You want to move a veterans bill, which is good, bad, has some good pieces, some bad pieces. You want to move a daylight savings time bill, which makes permanent daylight savings time, which by the way, I understand it. People don’t want to change their clocks, all that stuff, but really?  This is the priority? OK, fine. You want to do it? At least choose Standard Time so that kids aren’t going to wake up at 8:30 in the morning on Dec. 21 in Austin, Texas, and it’s dark. And so, these are things that I think we’re going, “Guys, can we just focus on the prize? We have illegal aliens in our country.  “We have Islamists wanting to take over our nation. We have China wanting to kill us. We have the reality that we’ve got serious problems with surveillance of American people, flock cameras, kill switches in automobiles. We have massive surveillance under FISA.” Are we addressing any of those things?  Are we addressing the collection of that data? Are we addressing energy freedom? Are we addressing making America healthy again? Are we going to ban congressional stock trading? Now we pressed that this week, too.  I think we’re getting movement on that, but that was a bill I was the first to introduce five years ago.  It’s look, guys, let’s just show the American people we’re serious about what we said. So, we’re making some movement, and again, we try to give. We sat down trying to work through reconciliation. We’re trying to work through that right now as we speak and whether it’s paid for or not, how you move SAVE America.  Devlin: SAVE America Act. Where does it go from here?  What routes are available to those who want to see this election integrity measure passed?  Roy: The route is very simple. The House keeps elevating the pressure. The president keeps elevating the pressure, and either the Senate does the right thing or it does not. The Senate can do this. There’s no limit to the Senate doing this. They simply need 50, plus JD, 51, would be better who are willing to do the right thing and either force the talking filibuster, and the clock’s kind of winding down on that.  You’re running out of time to be able to do that, certainly before November. But they could stay here over August. They could do it. That’s a choice. So, that’s one. Two, you can use the reconciliation process, you can make a choice that whatever the parliamentarian rules on with respect to questions involving what’s called the Byrd Bath.  And for everyone listening out there, this is something that didn’t exist prior to 50 years ago. A senator put this rule in place when you’re dealing with the reconciliation process, maybe for some good reason, maybe for some bad. But the Senate goes through and says whether this stuff is germane or whether it’s, in the right jurisdiction, all these different rules.  And look, you can make choices on that. By the way, Democrats do this stuff all the time. They look at the rules, they unite around it, and they jam Obamacare down our throats using reconciliation, which is precisely what they did 15 years ago. And so, if we want to do this, it’s just a matter of John Thune and the senators having the will to do it.  In defense of John Thune, he could be playing harder ball here and doing more, in my opinion, but it’s up to the Senate. And if 51 senators will act, they can do it. Under reconciliation, they could do it. And they can modify filibuster rules. Some of us believe the filibuster’s going to get thrown out.  By the way, when I say the filibuster, the 60-vote artificial shutoff debate threshold.   I believe, and I’ve been advocating for, as Mike Lee has, the talking filibuster and changing some of the reconciliation rules, or maybe tweaking the filibuster rules to say you can have 51 votes for this and this scenario, but 60 here.  We did it with judges, for better or worse. That’s where we are. And I say if you want to protect the cooling saucer and keep the filibuster in its concept, the breaking point has to be when the will of the body and the majority of the body is sitting there long enough and they want to go a direction, eventually you have to give.  That’s my view. In other words, 60 is a slowdown, right? If you don’t have 60 to shut off debate, we’re going to be debating this for a while. Yeah. Move forward, or maybe it’s having a 51-vote threshold if you have a government shutdown, right? As I said, you can pass a CR or whatever. But the Senate’s got to evolve to be able to say, “We got to be able to function and still be a cooling saucer, or you’re going to lose the entire cooling saucer.”  And I think this is a really important point that I hope is a takeaway here for Senate nerds or close watchers of this stuff. If you want to preserve any aspect of the Senate cooling saucer slowdown, you have got to currently reform what they’re doing, and that includes things like we’re talking about here and the talking filibuster and other things, or it will be blown out.  There will be no filibuster. There will be no slowdown. It’ll be a 51-vote, and if you’ve got the majority, you ram through anything you want with the majority vote, and lose the voice of a single senator to slow things down. And I think that would be a mistake. 

Congress just passed two major Republican efforts in one bill. The Stop Insider Trading Act, meant to stop members of Congress from profiting from the stock market based on insider knowledge, included the SAVE America Act. The legislation passed Wednesday evening, 232-198, with 13 Democrats joining Republicans to pass it. The Stop Insider Trading Act bans sitting members of Congress and their immediate families from purchasing individual stocks from publicly traded companies. If they wish to sell shares, the bill requires that they file a public notice between 14 and seven days before the sale. Republicans also managed to add language from the SAVE America Act, requiring voters to show valid identification when they vote. Republicans say both issues are “90-10 issues” with Americans, meaning they have overwhelming bipartisan public support. “Too often, Americans struggling to make ends meet have watched as lawmakers have entered office to leave as multimillionaires,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said at a House Republican Leadership press conference. “There’s a handful of glaring examples. A couple of those people are still serving, notably on the Democrat side. … Democrats only talk about corruption; Republicans are actually delivering real solutions to restore the public’s faith in our institutions,” he continued. However, some members of Congress claim this isn’t a strong enough ban on stock trading and won’t move in the Senate. “It puts us a little closer to what we need, obviously, and I really don’t think it’s going anywhere in the Senate anyway,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told reporters outside after the vote. Burchett was originally skeptical of the legislation but said he voted to pass it after speaking with Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., who introduced the legislation. “I just don’t think we’re being genuine with the public about it, and we should ban stock trading by members of Congress. You should not own individual stocks—you ought to own a mutual fund,” Burchett said, telling members they should do it like he does. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, described the bill as a “big win.” “I think this would be a giant step forward,” Roy told the Daily Signal after the vote, adding that he thinks attaching the SAVE America Act to the bill is going to hold it back in the Senate. “This would allow you to maintain your portfolio when you come to Congress but then do like we do for SEC for publicly trading companies—you know, [with] seven days advance, say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go sell,’ and then not be able to buy any other equities, only broadly held funds. That would be a big change,” Roy said. He added that he was glad to see many Democrats join Republicans to pass the legislation.