KTBB News, Weather, Talk

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill on Monday that aims to reduce federal regulations and expand local control, one of the most sweeping efforts in recent decades to increase supply and bring down prices.

The bill, which passed 85-5 and now heads to the House, has been the focus of intense negotiations in recent weeks as lawmakers in both parties try to address housing costs in an election year. The final version of the legislation bans corporate investors from buying single-family homes but doesn’t include a Senate provision that would have required investors to sell newly constructed homes within seven years.

The measure was the result of years of work to “lower costs, expand housing supply, cut red tape, protect taxpayers, and help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership,” said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., who worked with Democrats to get the bill passed.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the banking panel, said it is the most significant housing bill to pass Congress since 1990, when the average home in America was sold for $150,000. Now it costs more than $500,000, she said.

The bill “acknowledges that the federal government has a role to play in lowering housing prices,” Warren told The Associated Press. “For the first time ever, private equity will be blocked from buying up single-family homes and trying to turn housing into one more Wall Street investment.”

Senate passage of the bill shapes up as a rare bipartisan legislative achievement when much of Republicans’ agenda has stalled. The House is expected to give final approval later this week and send the bill to President Donald Trump, who has signaled his support.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who helped negotiate the legislation, said it was a “huge step toward finally addressing the affordable housing and homelessness crises in this country.”

Housing costs are a concern for both parties

Republicans and Democrats have embraced the bill as a way to show they are addressing the nation’s affordability crisis, driven in part by rising home prices due to a shortage of affordable housing. The U.S. housing market has been in a slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes have been hovering close to a 4-million annual pace going back to 2023 — well short of the 5.2-million annual pace that’s historically been the norm. Sales slowed last year to a 30-year low and have remained sluggish so far this year, declining in January and February versus a year earlier.

The Economic Report of the President in April found a shortage of 10 million homes, while a report this month from the Joint Center For Housing Studies at Harvard University found sales of existing homes were at three-decade lows and inventories were rising due to high home buying costs. “Cost burdens for both renters and owners continue to climb, while assistance remains profoundly underfunded,” the report said.

While the median U.S. monthly rent has been declining for nearly three years, it was still 17.2% higher in May than it was before the pandemic, according to data from Realtor.com.

Changes for grants, Section 8 and manufactured housing

To increase the supply of housing, the bill would streamline environmental reviews and speed up the construction process.

It would offer funding to local governments that build more housing, including Community Development Block Grant money to places exceeding the median rate of homebuilding. It would also provide new dollars for communities to turn abandoned infrastructure into housing, and offers a framework for communities that want to reform outdated zoning regulations, which often limit larger housing developments.

The legislation would allow banks to invest more in affordable housing and raise limits on the number of public housing units that can receive private financing through Section 8 funding to rehabilitate properties. And it would remove outdated requirements and expand federal financing to make manufactured homes more affordable.

“Manufactured housing produces some of the most cost-effective housing in America, but access to financing has been tightly restricted,” Warren said. “This creates the opportunity for more manufactured housing and, at the same time, creates a structure for people living in manufactured housing communities to organize and protect their investment in their homes.”

Lawmakers compromised on a disaster program

One of the sticking points between the two chambers was over a federal disaster recovery program.

An earlier Senate bill had permanently authorized block grant recovery funds, a change intended to ensure that funding requests aren’t needed after every disaster. House lawmakers opposed that provision because of concerns over how the program was run, so they agreed on a three-year authorization instead.

The final bill has received widespread support in the housing community, both from organizations representing landlords and large property owners as well as groups that advocate for tenants and low-income renters.

“There is no magic wand that will fix this crisis overnight, and no single piece of legislation is perfect,” said David Dworkin, chief executive of the National Housing Conference, the nation’s oldest housing coalition.

“Compromise demands that. But this bill is a significant down payment on a long-term effort to make housing more affordable for all Americans.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s efforts to nationalize elections can no longer be used.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan said in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”

The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.

DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”

Voting by noncitizens was already rare

The executive order seeking to create a national voter list is among numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul the way elections are run. He also has tried to force voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, ban mail ballots from counting if they are received after Election Day and prohibit the Postal Service from mailing ballots to people not on an approved list of voters. Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president.

Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for just a tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls,

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.

Anthony Nel was one of those whose registrations were wrongly flagged. The South Africa native became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, canceled temporarily last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The check wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen.

“I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for granted,” he said in a text message.

Right to keep Americans’ data private is at heart of the case

The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.

“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” the judge wrote. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls.

“They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan’s ruling as an “across the board victory” and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge’s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn’t have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.

Mark Johnson, who teaches at the University of Kansas law school and regularly pursues lawsuits over election laws, said “it couldn’t be more clear” that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws.

He said an executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law.

“It’s an illegal idea. Plus it’s a bad idea,” he said.

Elon Musk’s DOGE effort was crucial for updating the SAVE system

During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims of widespread noncitizen voting, Republican secretaries of state began requesting improvements to the SAVE system to make it more efficient for catching noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation was that the system had been able to check just a single individual at a time.

DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency delivered on those requests in 2025, according to public announcements. They made SAVE free for election officials, allowed agencies to search voters by the thousands and began permitting queries using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers, as opposed to requiring DHS-issued identification numbers.

Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved its value as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter citizenship. But in her ruling, Judge Sooknanan said the plaintiffs had shown that the updated system had indeed been identifying some lawful voters as noncitizens and that states using it “are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

HOUSTON (AP) – Parents of a 2-year-old girl involved in a drowning incident on Memorial Day have sued to stop Texas Children’s Hospital from testing if she’s brain dead, testing a new strategy in Texas’ “right to life” movement aimed at giving people as much access to life-supporting services as possible.

While most fights to keep patients on life support begin after they’ve been given a brain death diagnosis, Annelise Camp’s parents are battling the hospital at an earlier stage, the testing phase.

“This is not settled science,” said state Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, who has helped drive the public’s attention to the Camps, who live in Cypress.

Brain death is defined in Texas law as the irreversible cessation of brain function. Under the law, once a patient is declared brain dead, a hospital can withdraw life-sustaining measures.

According to court documents, the Camps say Annelise shouldn’t be tested for brain death so she can have more time to recover. They also ask that she be transferred to another hospital to explore other treatment options. However, Texas Children’s has stated it wants to conduct testing to determine next steps in her medical care and that it has no imminent plans to end care for Annelise.

This case has drawn the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who posted on X in support of the Camp family: “I am closely monitoring this case and will act to protect this child and honor her parents’ efforts to save her.” Influential anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life has started working with the family, too.

Given growing attention to the Camp family’s fight, bioethics and legal experts say that this could empower other families to fight brain testing, which is becoming more common. The case has already inspired at least one lawmaker to create new laws and build on Texas’ existing laws that protect the rights of patients and their families to extend life-sustaining services and access experimental treatments.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a yearslong fight among some right-to-life advocates to end the brain death diagnosis because they believe multiple organs have to fail to be considered a biological death.

Meanwhile, medical experts believe there needs to be a “clear line” that distinguishes life from death otherwise ICUs would lose capacity to treat patients that have a chance of recovery, said David Magnus, a Stanford University medicine and biomedical ethics professor.

It appears no courts in Texas have determined the legality of brain death tests, said Thomas Mayo, professor emeritus of law at Southern Methodist University. If the state district court rules in the family’s favor, it would not be binding in other courts, Mayo said.

However, “if Texas Right to Life is involved in any way, and the family loses, this case would likely go to appeal,” he added.

The brain death debate

The Camp family were visiting relatives on Memorial Day, when Annelise wandered into the hotel pool without her life jacket, Johnston Camp, Annelise’s father, told FOX 26 Houston in early June. She was pulled out of the water by family members who began CPR until first responders arrived. Camp was taken to Texas Children’s west Houston location and after an hour her heartbeat returned.

“She never gave up when I asked her to do something… I’m never gonna give up on her,” Camp told the station.

Since the interview, the Camps have declined speaking to The Texas Tribune, citing a court order that prevents them from doing so, said their lawyer Heath Novosad. Texas Children’s has also declined to comment on the case.

Three days after Annelise was hospitalized, her parents filed a temporary restraining order against Texas Children’s after physicians said they had exhausted all treatment options and advised that the child get tested for brain death, according to court documents filed in late May. The documents say Annelise’s heart was beating, although she was dependent on a ventilator. The Camps have refused any brain death testing and want to transfer Annelise to another hospital to receive hyperbaric oxygen treatment or stem cell therapies.

Texas Children’s officials said in court documents they’ve contacted medical facilities to ask about accepting Annelise, but 35 of the 36 have declined and the one pending hospital said it needed her to undergo brain death testing to consider transfer.

The court granted the family’s request for a temporary injunction and the family is asking for a permanent halt to brain testing.

Hospitals usually notify family members, but are not required to get permission from them or the patient to conduct brain death testing.

Under the Uniform Determination of Death Act, if someone is determined brain dead, they are considered legally dead and hospitals have the right to discontinue organ-supporting services.

According to Texas Right to Life, which has long fought the legal recognition of brain death and its use to stop life-sustaining measures, brain death is not consistent with the Christian faith. As long as there is a heartbeat, a person is still alive. The Camp family has stated in court documents brain death testing is against their religious beliefs.

“Texans have the right to say we don’t believe in this,” said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, adding that his organization has worked with 106 patients to fight for life-sustaining treatment, an increase in the last three years. “A dead person has no rights, and that’s the problem with the brain death concept, in general, is it is a shortcut to deprive individuals of the right to life and other rights.”

Magnus, the Stanford professor, said that if hospitals are no longer able to diagnose someone with brain death and are forced to keep more people on life support, this could strain resources, such as ICU beds.

“Using that scarce resource for somebody who has no chance of ever making any recovery doesn’t really make a lot of sense,” he said. “When the hospital beds are full, Texas will not be a good place to get sick.”

Magnus worries that if hospitals are no longer allowed to recognize brain death diagnosis, organ procurement could decline which places the burden of organ donations on other states or else, many Texans could be at risk of dying.

“That means that if you have renal failure, you die. You have liver failure in Texas, you’ll die. When you have heart failure in Texas, you’ll die,” he said.

While some of the loudest critics of the brain death diagnosis have been among anti-abortion advocates, not all are in agreement. Texas Alliance for Life points out that the definition of death in state law is based in “sound medical science,” its executive director Amy O’Donnell said. She declined to comment specifically on Camp’s case.

Room to expand “right to life” laws?

In the last few decades, Texas legislators made attempts to create and fine-tune “right to life” laws that expand the rights of those who have been declared brain dead. None have addressed brain death testing, which is ripe ground for new legislation.

“We passed legislation in the state of Texas and we think people will just follow it,” Toth said.

In 2023, state lawmakers expanded the Right to Try law – originally limited to terminally ill patients – to give chronically ill patients access to investigational treatments if they had exhausted approved options. The same year, the Legislature changed the Texas Advance Directive Act, so that hospitals must give families of patients 25 days’ notice before pulling life support, increasing it from 10 days. Although, groups like Texas Right to Life believe that there should be no time limit.

This change came three years after the family of 1-year-old Tinslee Lewis challenged the advance directive act, also garnering national attention. Lewis was born with a rare heart defect that kept her on life-support in Cook Children’s Medical Center’s ICU from birth. Leveraging the law’s life-support time limit, doctors at the Fort Worth hospital wanted to take Tinslee off life support against her mother’s wishes and an appeals court ruled in the family’s favor. Lewis was discharged after two years, according to CBS.

Toth, who carried the House version of the bill that changed the Right to Try law in 2023, said he would push to give families the right to contest the brain death test and make it difficult for hospitals to procure organs from patients declared brain dead.

Toth, who won the Republican primary for Texas’ 2nd Congressional District in Houston in the spring, ultimately wants to eliminate the brain death diagnosis on a national level.

“I think that we’ve got to be really careful at just observing the rights of parents to make this decision, this call for themselves,” said Toth.

Texas does not have legislation that provides for a reasonable accommodation of a religious objection to brain death, said Mayo.

If the brain death diagnosis was taken off the books, hospitals can still leverage the Texas Advance Directive Act which places a time limit on how long a hospital is responsible for life-supporting treatment, Magnus said, but “courts in Texas have been inconsistent about applying their own law.”

“Courts in other states have gone back and forth over whether a determination of brain death can be done at all, and whether once it’s done, the physician’s findings are determinative of further treatment or stopping treatment. I think it’s a very, very emerging question that is getting disparate treatment in various jurisdictions,” said Mayo.

In these cases, the courts will usually tell the hospital to keep the patient on life support, said Magnus. “Basically the courts don’t want to be the one that makes (the brain death) determination,” he said.

NEW YORK (AP) — The top U.S. auto regulator opened an investigation Monday after a Tesla using an automated driving feature slammed into a Texas home at high speed and killed a 76-year-old woman standing inside.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it’s opening a special investigation into the Tesla Model 3 crash on Friday near Houston, a significant probe because the car was using technology that Elon Musk considers key to the company’s future.

The Tesla CEO is rolling out robotaxis using automated software in several U.S. cities this year and plans to invite Tesla owners to put their cars into the fleet using the same system across the country.

The driver told the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that he was using the technology, according to a police report on the crash, but it’s not clear what role, if any, it played in the incident.

The police report also noted that the driver was not drunk and is cooperating. It identified the woman killed as Martha Avila.

Video obtained by KHOU-TV shows the car traveling at top speed over the front lawn of a brick home in Katy, then ramming into a front room. The next shot shows the car encased in the home amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture.

Tesla did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The auto safety regulator, known as NHTSA, has launched several investigations into Tesla, including one late last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, leading to more than a dozen crashes and fires and nearly two dozen injuries.

A few months earlier, the NHTSA opened an investigation into why Tesla apparently had not been reporting crashes promptly as required.

As for special crash investigations, the NHTSA has opened 46 involving Teslas using self-driving or driver-assistance technology over the past decade, according to the agency’s records. In more than a dozen of those crashes, at least one person — a driver, passenger or pedestrian — was killed.

Tesla stock fell sharply early last year as car sales plunged amid a boycott of Musk after he waded into politics, leading President Donald Trump’s budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative and embracing European extremist candidates.

Musk has since shifted the Tesla story to one less about car sales and more about AI and robotaxis, and done so successfully. The stock is up 16% in the past year.