Foreign-born truckers who illegally immigrated to the United States are receiving inadequate driving instruction, taking jobs away from American workers, and endangering the lives of fellow drivers. That’s the message of a new documentary from Steve Cortes called “Collision Course: Illegal Migrant Truckers.” Cortes, a Daily Signal contributor and founder of the League of American Workers advocacy group, exposes how political agendas have led to deaths on the road and a bad job market for the truckers who keep America moving. Featuring interviews with leaders of companies in the trucking industry and clips of the worst accidents involving foreign-born drivers, Cortes’ documentary gives Americans an understanding of why our nation’s trucking industry needs protection. Risks on the Road “Radical policies and dirty politicians put your family at risk on the road,” Cortes said. “I’m talking about extremists like [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom, who, frankly, don’t care if you die in totally preventable accidents, as long as they get to push reckless, unpopular policies that please their narrow base, but turn too many American highways into danger zones.” Democrat-led states have loosened their standards for obtaining commercial driver’s licenses, and it’s resulted in bad drivers commanding 80,000-pound trucks. “Now, who is put in danger? Well, just about everyone, unfortunately, because these intentionally reckless policies create massive risks for every single American just getting into a vehicle,” Cortes said. That drives up prices in the grocery store and spikes insurance premiums. It also hurts the men who have honestly earned their CDL certifications, and the companies that pay the $12,000 to hire, certify, and train a driver before putting him or her on the road. CDL Mills in Blue States Mark Hazelwood has worked in the trucking business for his entire life and founded the truck stop company Pilot Flying J in 1985. Now the company sees up to $40 billion a year in business and has over 700 locations. He said foreign drivers have increased drastically over the last six years.  “It really exacerbated itself just after COVID,” Hazelwood said. “Everybody talked about having a supply chain issue, and so the previous administration then went to the blue states, and they quickly set up CDL mills, and within 24, 48 hours, they put these illegals out on the road with a CDL in their hand.” According to Roadmaster Drivers School, obtaining a CDL typically requires at least one month. The rushed process under the Biden administration tripled the number of drivers who acquired CDLs outside of their state—and many of them were certified at so-called “CDL mills.” “The non-domiciled CDL holders went from, I think at the end of the first Trump term, was in the low 200s, maybe upper 180, 190, and now that number is over 780,000 non-domiciled CDL holders,” Hazelwood said. Hazelwood also noted in the documentary that there has been a problem with foreign drivers bypassing the electronic logging devices that tally the miles and hours driven, resulting in drivers being on the road for more hours a day than is legal for safety reasons. These truckers are also far more affordable for companies to hire. “They can pay them literally half of what they’re paying those that are running legally,” Hazelwood said. Illegal Alien Highway Wrecks One in five truck drivers in America is foreign, according to Cortes. Some of them are legally certified, capable drivers. But some turn highways into a wrecking zone. In 2025, for example, illegal migrant Harjinder Singh pulled an illegal U-turn in Florida, killing three American citizens. “When he was pulled off the side of the road, he answered three out of 16 questions properly,” Florida’s Lt. Gov. Jay Collins said in a clip. “Why was he driving in the first place? He didn’t have basic English proficiency, he didn’t know the road signs, and yet he is driving a giant vehicle across our state.” Florida can’t be the only state to enforce legitimate CDL certification. What’s legal in one state affects the entire country, according to Nathan Meisgeier, president and chief counsel of Werner Enterprises trucking. “A lot of truck freight crosses multiple state lines from origin to destination,” Meisgeier said. “And so, if you have a CDL from a state that is being overly permissive, that creates capacity and a safety concern in all of the other 48 contiguous United States.” There’s no doubt that trucking has suffered under loose standards. But America can’t run without its truckers. And enforcing good policy will ensure America continues to thrive. “It’s been a tough three or four years, but we can see the turn has happened,” Meisgeier said. “And again, it’s a great industry. Keeping America moving makes us feel like we’re all contributing to the great American success story.”

The following is an excerpt of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, for the “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?   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 OMB and others.  That’s rare. And a Congress that has some 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 [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’s H.R.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.  Bradley 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 H.R.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 H.R.2, H.R.2, H.R.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?   Chip 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, et cetera.  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.   Bradley 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 H.R.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.  Chip Roy: And this to your point about and responding to your question about the H.R.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, H.R.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 H.R.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.  Bradley 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 H.R.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 H.R.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.  Chip 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, okay?  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, okay.”  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? Okay, 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 December 21st 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.  Bradley 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?  Chip 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. 

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested five illegal aliens convicted for “repulsive” crimes Tuesday, the agency announced Wednesday. “Yesterday, ICE arrested more monsters from our communities, including murderers, pedophiles, and drug traffickers,” Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis told the Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “ICE is NOT backing down and will continue to remove criminals from our communities.” Bis cited a Harvard University/Harris poll from last month, finding that 80% of U.S. voters say they support “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes.” She said this demonstrates broad support for “the Trump administration’s commonsense efforts to deport criminal illegal aliens from our country.” ICE provided the Daily Signal with names and mugshots for five illegal aliens “convicted for repulsive crimes including first-degree murder, sexual exploitation of a minor, lewd or lascivious acts with a minor under 16 years old, cruelty toward a child, and manufacturing or distribution of a controlled dangerous substance.” 1. Omar Israel Hernandez Omar Israel Hernandez (ICE) ICE arrested Omar Israel Hernandez, an illegal alien from Mexico. ICE claimed he had been convicted of first-degree murder in Wyandotte County, Kansas. 2. Guillermo Bernabe Pablo-Gutierrez Guillermo Bernabe Pablo-Gutierrez (ICE) ICE arrested Guillermo Bernabe Pablo-Gutierrez, an illegal alien from Guatemala. ICE claimed he has been convicted in Columbia, Tennessee, of four counts of attempting to engage in sex with a minor and three counts of sexual exploitation of a minor involving a photograph. 3. Rey Alfredo Ornelas-Virgen Rey Alfredo Ornelas-Virgen (ICE) ICE arrested Rey Alfredo Ornelas-Virgen, an illegal alien from Mexico. ICE claimed Ornelas-Virgen had been convicted in Boise, Idaho, of lewd or lascivious acts with a minor under 16 years old, cruelty toward a child, and child fondling. 4. Claudio Jassel Payamps-Rosario Claudio Jassel Payamps-Rosario (ICE) ICE arrested Claudio Jassel Payamps-Rosario, an illegal alien from the Dominican Republic. ICE claimed Payamps-Rosario had been convicted in Camden County, New Jersey, for manufacturing or distributing a controlled dangerous substance and possession of a firearm. 5. Omar Gutierrez-Espinal Omar Gutierrez-Espinal (ICE) ICE arrested Omar Gutierrez-Espinal, an illegal alien from the Dominican Republic. ICE claimed he has been convicted of conspiracy with intent to distribute heroin and cocaine and of receiving stolen property in Brooklyn, New York. ICE Backing Down? Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday temporarily ordered ICE to cease conducting vehicle stops, causing some of President Donald Trump’s supporters to worry that the administration was de-emphasizing deportations. Border czar Tom Homan told the Daily Signal Tuesday, however, that the pause would not slow down the rate of deportations. “Let me address that: I’m sick and tired of reading about how the administration has lost their guts with mass deportations,” he said. NEW: I asked @RealTomHoman if the pause on vehicle stops will lower the rate of deportations, and he gave an emphatic "NO.""Let me address that: I'm sick and tired of reading about how the administration has lost their their guts with mass deportations," he told @DailySignal… pic.twitter.com/N7TBP9ZZjM— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) July 14, 2026 ICE reportedly arrested 10,000 people in five days last month, as the Trump administration attempts to deport some of the 10 million illegal aliens who entered the country under President Joe Biden. ICE officers fatally shot a 25-year-old Colombian man, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Monday while trying to stop his vehicle in Biddeford, Maine. Last Tuesday, an ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, during a vehicle stop in Houston, Texas. Agents claimed Araujo had been attempting to evade arrest and rammed his van into an ICE vehicle, prompting the agent to shoot in self-defense. Araujo’s family and their attorney contest the claim.

Election controversy is swirling ahead of the midterms as a voter solicitation scandal, Trump endorsement, FBI investigation, and election change dominate Georgia’s headlines. Recently, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger opened an investigation into deceased people and a deceased pet receiving voter registration solicitations across the state. Ready to Register, a nonprofit organization that aids in voter registration, is being investigated for the solicitations it sent out through the mail. In a written comment to the Daily Signal, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office said, “Our office received over 400 letters showing a solicitation to register sent by a third-party organization called ‘Ready to Register, Inc.’ Our office had nothing to do with this solicitation. We are investigating to determine whether Ready to Register violated any Georgia laws and will refer the case for prosecution if our investigation determines any laws were violated.” The controversy surfaced when Ready to Register sent a voter solicitation mail to a recipient, and that recipient forwarded the mail to Raffensperger’s office. The recipient noted, “My wife has been deceased since April 15, 2023.” In response to the suspicious solicitations, Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA, told the Daily Signal, “The State Election Board is investigating Ready to Register right now, and we’ll have to wait to see what the investigation reveals in order to determine how to prevent that occurrence in the future.” FBI Presidential Election Investigation The FBI has continued investigating Fulton County’s 2020 election records amid new reports that the ongoing investigation has ramped up. The investigation taking place ties in with President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that he received the majority of the votes from Georgia’s Electoral College. “The FBI investigators,” Favorito stated, “are reviewing documents now, and they are supposed to complete their initial review on July 17.” Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts told The Center Square that the county has not received “communication, notification, or additional subpoenas from the FBI or the Justice Department about an increase in agents reviewing ballots.” MS Now reported that the FBI has assigned hundreds of analysts to examine ballots from the election. Back in January, the agency took hold of over 600 ballot boxes, tabulator tapes, and additional election materials from the Fulton County Elections office. On July 7, a federal judge struck down the Department of Justice’s subpoenas seeking information on the county’s election workers. Trump’s Endorsements On Monday, Trump endorsed Dr. John Cowan, who is running for the 11th Congressional District in Georgia. Cowan’s run for office comes at a time when Rep. Barry Loudermilk has offered his resignation, which will occur at the end of his current term. Cowan will face the Democrat candidate, Chris Harden, and the independent candidate, Natalie Richoz, during the general election in November. “A proven leader, John has served his community well as a highly respected neurosurgeon, small business owner, and civic leader, prior to running for Congress,” Trump said in his endorsement. New Election Rules Last Wednesday, the Georgia State Election Board accepted two new rules created to increase confidence in the state’s elections. Of the two rules, one will have a later impact, as it prohibits a vote-counting method that will not be utilized in the near future. The other rule could lead to a court case, particularly following Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s warning that the rule would override the Constitution. Georgia’s current voting system allows registered voters to choose their candidate or selection on a digital screen, and the system then prints out their selections on a slip of paper that they insert into a scanner, recording the ballot. The slip of paper displays the voter’s selections, while a QR code containing the same information is used to submit voter choices to the state. However, the QR code system has led some to question whether the information from the QR code and the voter’s paper selections agree. The first rule the election board agreed upon mandates that vote-counting take place using a paper ballot and not a digital copy. The second rule mandates that vote-counting happens in public.

Vice President JD Vance criticized the U.S. Senate for delaying the SAVE America Act during an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that dropped on Wednesday. When the conversation turned to mail-in ballots and fraudulent voting, Rogan asked why voter ID wasn’t required in elections. Vance jumped in with a response. “So, we are right now trying to pass the SAVE America Act,” the vice president said. “One of its main provisions is a requirement that you do voter ID. And we actually have, I think, a majority of the Senate that would support it. But this is just weird Senate procedural bulls—. There’s a subsegment of people who want voter ID but won’t blow up the filibuster in order to achieve it.” He went on to explain why certain senators are clinging to the filibuster, noting the difference between items that require 50 votes, instead of 60, to pass. “What we have tried to persuade the Senate to do is to treat the voter ID as something that can fall within the 50-vote threshold,” Vance said. “And there is no law, there’s no provision in the Constitution.” “There are senators who are so attached to the idea that budget is 50, [but] non-budget is 60, that they’re quite literally willing to prevent voter ID in America.”  During the exchange, Rogan said that Democrats encourage cheating by using fear tactics. “I think they cheat, and I think they’ve been doing it forever, and I don’t think there’s any other reason why you would have no voter ID,” Rogan said. “They try to say it’s racist to have voter ID. Like, what are you talking about? Do you think other races are incapable of going to the DMV? That’s insane. That’s racist,” he added. Rogan held the top podcast for the first quarter of 2026, according to Forbes. “The Joe Rogan Experience” has 21 million subscribers on YouTube alone.