The Senate Arms Services Committee moved forward a Defense Authorization Act that would require women to register for the draft. The move has sparked severe backlash from Republicans in the House. In this episode, we sit down with congressman Chip Roy to discuss select service for women, keeping non-citizens from voting and other congressional controversies. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, June 30th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us to discuss Registering Women for the Draft and the House Republican response to it is Congressman Chip Roy from Texas. Congressman, thank you so much for coming on. So first, how did this female selective service proposal come about?

Well, what you have, first of all, just to lay the context, the House Republicans, we passed the National Defense Authorization Act. It's a pretty solid, conservative bill. It cuts out a lot of the DEI and critical race theory and all of the offices over the Pentagon, gets rid of the transgender surgery stuff and those kinds of things. And it's a good bill, and it certainly does not go down the road of forcing women, our daughters, if you will, to register for selective service for the draft. Unfortunately, a small group over in the Senate, including Republicans, felt it important to include it in the Senate Committee Bill, the Senate Arm Services Committee, voted for the amendment and then voted out the NDA out of committee onto the floor with Republican support for a provision that would force women to register for selective service. I think this is foolish. I fought this three years ago, and they first were trying to bring this up. Fought it vigorously. We were able to kill it. Both the House and Senate had a version that included it. We killed it over here in the House, killed it last time. This time, we kept it out of the House.

Now, we got to go fight it out of the Senate.

As for the people who support this bill, what are their arguments for it?

They don't have really good arguments other than just, Okay, well, equality, everybody should be able to serve or treat it the same. I'm like, Well, first of all, you can go sign up and you can volunteer. Second of all, I'm still not a fan of women in combat, regardless of whether it's volunteer or not. It's certainly not compulsory. And importantly, though, what I hear over here is, Chip, don't ever worry like that. They'll never be drafted into combat. We'll never do it. Then they'll say, well, we'll only need a draft if we're in a land war with China. I'm like, well, we're in a land war with China and we're losing our... I think it's 17 million men between the age of 18 and in fighting age. We're losing those guys and we need women, then you're not going to need them unless you feel like you're going to need to go put them down on the front lines. All of this, by the way, ignores all the performance. We've got study after study after study that shows that women cannot perform at the same level in combat. These are military DOD commissioned studies. There was one from 2015 where the Marine Corps, $36 million, by the way, to say that mixed units were outperformed by all male units.

That's mixed, by the 70% of the time in combat tasks. By the way, after multiple iterations of the Army combat fitness test, the Army Navy dropped its gender-neutral standards after nearly 50% of active duty enlisted female soldiers could not pass previous versions of the test. By the way, 92% of men could.

How has the role of women in the military evolved since 2016? And what impact does that have on the current debate over the draft?

Well, first of all, they can't even decide what the hell a woman is, including at the Pentagon, including in defense. Talking about all the Title IX nonsense, what's going on. And you can't even actually acknowledge the diversity of man and woman. But what you've got going on at the Pentagon is an affirmative effort by the Pentagon to force the DEI stuff onto not just people who've enlisted, but on to Americans. A draft is a whole other issue. They can't acknowledge that there is, in fact, just two sexes. Why would I entrust them with my daughter? When questioned on this, the Army Secretary, Christine Warmoot, admitted to Senator Cotton in a hearing, We wanted to make sure we didn't unfairly have standards for a particular subgroup that people couldn't perform. We didn't want to disadvantage any subgroup. Are you shitting me? This is crazy.

Now, a Senate committee has already passed this 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. What are the next steps for that? Will you be able to stop it?

Well, I hope so. I mean, first of all, every Republican senator, I mean, I have a Democrat senator, too, should be shamed if they vote for the National Defense Authorization Act. I include any of my friends in that category, by the way. No Republican should vote for the National Defense Authorization Act in the Senate, including a provision that would draft your daughters. I mean, and any of the fathers over there. If they think this is a good idea, I want them to go on a TV and explain it if they vote for it. Number one. Number two, if the Senate Republicans are too cowardly to stop this and they send it to a conference, then we in the House must do our duty to stop it. I'm going to put every single ounce of my energy into ensuring that we stop it if it gets to the conference, but it shouldn't get there. We ought to speak with one loud, clear voice on this.

Now shifting gears a bit here to the issue of election integrity. You co-authored, along with Senator Mike Lee, the Save Act. That's the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. The point of it is to ensure that only US citizens participate in federal elections. Where does that stand?

We hope to bring the SAVE Act to the House floor the week after July fourth recess. We brought it through committee, through the House Admin Committee about a month ago. It was unanimous Republican support, Democrats oppose it. The bill would, as you described it, require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote for federal elections. Now, we don't have control over the state and local elections, nor should we. Of course, it would have the practical effect of probably forcing that change, and that's not necessarily a bad thing in this case. But bottom line is, in a Republican form of government, in our Republic with 50 states, we cannot allow jurisdictions like California, New York, and other places to say, oh, well, whatever. We want a legal to be able to vote in state and local elections. Wink, wink, nod, nod. Don't worry, they won't have used Social Security numbers. We won't register them to vote in state and local elections, then have that bleed over to federal. Trust us, don't worry. Meanwhile, current federal law under motor voter prohibit states from being able to go check and make sure you're a citizen. Arizona has to maintain two sets of rules, one to check on their state and local elections because they do that, and one for federal where they're It's prohibited.

So my legislation, along with Mike Lee in the Senate, would not only fix that, making it to where you can check, it would actually require it. We think it's important. We think there'll be, hopefully, unanimous Republican support. Some people raise federalism questions with it. Mike Lee and Chip Roy, you're two of your biggest federalists, right? We don't like big government. We're talking about federal elections here. Should we require that everybody who votes across this country be a citizen? We think so. There's documented evidence of abuse of this. We know that non-citizens have voted. We should clean that out. We've got 51.5 million foreign-born people in this country. We need to make sure we have elections that are secure.

That seems reasonable enough. Now, to the national debt, the Congressional Budget Office has just estimated that the US debt will reach a stunning 56 trillion dollars by 2034. That's just 10 years from now. You've been a proponent of reducing the budget deficit, sometimes even fighting against your own party to do it. What will it take to get fiscal responsibility in Congress?

Well, look, the stats, there were 35 almost trillion dollars in debt. The clock is ticking $1.1 trillion dollars in interest this year, which is far more than our $875, roughly $75 billion dollars we spend on defense through the Pentagon. It's extraordinary, and it's frankly, it's just out of control. I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I mean, literally, it is out of control. Republicans have been giving lip service to spending restraint now for at least two solid decades. I think Republicans need to be held accountable as much or more Democrats. Democrats at least just acknowledge they're totally fine spending lots of money. They would just tax people more. We all agree, the more you tax, the more you constrain economic growth, you don't really bring in as much revenue. We want to have a higher GDP and keep the percentage of the revenue coming in from GDP at a good clip, but we want to create economic growth. But all that being said, when we've gone away from being able to point to tax and spend Democrats, now we're just all spend and spend politicians. Now, I don't lump myself into that category because I vote against virtually every spending bill.

But in order to change it, which was your question, you have to force it. The American people will have to force it, either through something like an Article 5 Convention of the States, or you're going to have to force your member of Congress. Can't give them a hall pass because you like them, because they're nice. They come back, they do the little hot dog thing, fourth of July, now you've known them for 20 years. No, you got to force that. You're going to stop spending money we don't have. And look, I'm going to throw everything I have at it. But the problem here is Endless wars, endless conflict, nonstop throwing money in defense. That is the Republican way of then eating all of the other money. And nobody will touch the fact that Medicare is spiraling out of control because our health care prices are dominated by monopolies and by Obamacare and regulations that are making health care so unaffordable, Medicare spiraling out of control. So if you want to fix it, constrain spending, stop endless wars, get our military focus on what it's supposed to be focused on, cut the bureaucracy across the board and cut the regulations and the bureaucrats enforcing it, and get health care prices down with radical transformative health care policy changes.

Congressman, thank you so much for coming on and giving us your unfiltered response.

Hey, thanks, guys. You all take care and have a good week next week.

That was Congressman Chip Roy, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wired.

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