Congress Has Started. Can Congress Finish? U.S. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) has introduced the Preserving Our Constitution Act of 2026, H.R. 9567, which would bar federal courts and adjudicative bodies from recognizing or enforcing foreign or religious laws, customs, or practices that conflict with the Constitution or federal law. It was referred to the House Judiciary Committee on June 30. It has six cosponsors. It has not had a hearing.
Self co-chairs the Sharia-Free America Caucus with U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). They launched the caucus in December 2025. The caucus has used a one-hour Special Order on the House floor and held a press conference. H.R. 9567 has not yet received a markup.
And even if the bill clears the House, Senate cloture rules can require sixty votes. We should fight for those votes. We should demand hearings. We should demand that our representatives say publicly where they stand.
But no one in Texas should mistake a federal bill for a federal remedy. Legislation that has not moved out of committee is a statement of intent, and Texans have waited on Washington’s statements of intent before.
Texas Did Not Wait. That Is Exactly Why the Next Question Matters. Here is what most Texans have not been told: on this issue, Texas moved first.
On November 18, 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) issued a proclamation designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations under state law. The proclamation states that the designations bar both from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.
Six days later, not before, but after, President Trump signed Executive Order 14362 opening the federal designation process.
In January 2026, the State Department designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as both a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, while the Treasury Department designated the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
Texas led. Washington followed. Since then, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has sued the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and CAIR’s Texas chapters, seeking to bar them from operating in Texas and acquiring property in the state. CAIR’s Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin chapters have sued Gov. Abbott and Paxton in their official capacities in federal court, alleging federal preemption, due process violations, and First Amendment retaliation. CAIR denies supporting terrorism and says the state’s actions are unlawful. The competing allegations remain unresolved.
In April 2026, Paxton opened an investigation into the Islamic Tribunal over claims about its relationship to the Texas judicial system. The Islamic Tribunal says it is not a court and that its proceedings are voluntary and nonbinding. As of September 19, 2026, the investigation had produced no public finding.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-Texas) has charged the Senate State Affairs Committee with studying “Preventing Sharia Law in Texas.” The House interim charges include a related review of whether foreign law, including Sharia law, has influenced matters beyond family law. The Republican Party of Texas made “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” a 2026-2028 legislative priority. The 90th Legislature gavels in on January 12, 2027.
So the honest question is not whether Texas has acted. Texas has acted more aggressively than any state in the country!
The question is why the designations have not produced arrests.
Designation is not enforcement
A designation can create authority. It does not create a case.
It does not produce a forensic accountant who can follow a wire transfer through four charitable intermediaries and two foreign banks. It does not produce a prosecutor who understands the difference between a Deobandi seminary and a Barelvi one. It does not produce an agent who knows which questions to ask.
Consider the record
The Holy Land Foundation case in North Texas produced terrorism-financing convictions in Dallas in 2008 involving a Richardson-based organization. In an April interview with The Dallas Express, Westrop said no Hamas or Muslim Brotherhood operative had been prosecuted on terrorism charges since that case.
The Justice Department later announced new Hamas-financing charges on July 31, 2026. The charges remain allegations, and that case remains pending. Westrop argues that the long gap reflects reduced investigative attention, not an end to the conduct.
That is the deficiency. We have designations without resulting prosecutions, proclamations without indictments, and a great deal of public argument about a category of threat Westrop argues the government has not staffed investigators to find.
Here is the part that should unsettle every Texan who has followed this story, and it comes from Sam Westrop, a researcher who has spent years conducting fieldwork on Texas networks.
Westrop told a Texas Public Policy Foundation audience in February that the Muslim Brotherhood is not the main event in Texas.
A Middle East Forum report he prepared groups the Islamist influence it identifies among Texas Islamic institutions into seven networks: Qutbists, including Muslim Brotherhood branches and Hamas; Deobandis; Barelvis; Salafis; Jamaat-e-Islami; Khomeinists; and Turkish Islamists.
MEF estimates that roughly one-quarter of Texas’ approximately 650 Islamic nonprofits show some degree of influence or control by one of those networks. Of the 213 organizations that filed tax returns, the report says they collectively disclosed $412 million in annual revenue.
Westrop considers Deobandi networks the most serious overlooked threat in Texas. Most Texans have never heard the name. They should. The Taliban, which U.S. forces fought in Afghanistan for two decades, emerged from the Deobandi tradition.
That does not make every Deobandi a Taliban supporter, but Westrop argues that policymakers need to understand the movement and its institutions. MEF’s report identifies Deobandi madrassas in Sugar Land and Dallas-Fort Worth seminaries that it says train imams for mosques across the country.
Alongside them, Westrop identifies: Barelvi subsects whose branches abroad he links to street violence and anti-blasphemy campaigns, with a U.S. presence in Texas. Jamaat-e-Islami, the South Asian counterpart to the Brotherhood, which Westrop says may exceed the Brotherhood in U.S. membership. Salafi seminary networks headquartered in Texas that he says have trained imams now preaching in Britain. Khomeinist charity structures. And behind several of them, he says, the soft-power money of Turkey.
Now hold that next to what Texas has actually designated: the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR. I support those designations. But if Westrop is right, and his fieldwork is among the most detailed analyses produced in this state, then Texas has named the two entities every conservative already knew how to name, while other large, well-funded networks identified in his analysis answer to neither. We have lit one corner of a dark room and declared the room searched!
That is not an argument for doing less. It is an argument that our designations are too narrow, our vocabulary is a generation out of date, and our investigators are looking for a logo instead of a ledger.
The money is moving through systems we have chosen not to audit
On July 30, the Texas House Committee on Homeland Security, Public Safety and Veterans’ Affairs took testimony on foreign financial influence in Texas. Westrop’s filing walked members through more than a dozen financial entities operating in the state and Islamic home-finance firms that he said report billions in originations and managed assets. He also described associated lending and charitable vehicles and alleged relationships between domestic entities, foreign networks and state actors abroad.
Separately, Middle East Forum research found that Texas-administered programs distributed roughly $16.3 million in state and federal grant money to Islamic nonprofits. MEF classifies more than $14.4 million of that amount as going to organizations aligned with Islamist movements. Read that again. Not foreign money. Our money. Administered in Austin, disbursed through programs Texans fund, to institutions MEF says warranted greater scrutiny.
This is the answer to the question people keep asking me: why can’t we find the money? We can find it. Much of it is in the 501(c)(3) system, filed on public Form 990s, sitting in state grant records. Westrop argues nobody has been assigned to connect them.
And now the access problem
Which brings me to Massachusetts, and to a question Texas will face next. Senate Bill S.2134 would create a permanent eleven-member state commission on the status of people who practice Islam. Most of it is unobjectionable research, public education, studying discrimination. But buried in the duties is subsection (d)(5), which directs the commission to identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions.
That is not merely a study commission. That is a standing government commission whose statutory assignment includes routing members of one religion into public positions.
The objection here is not mine alone, and it does not come from anyone in this fight. Ryan Jayne, senior policy counsel for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a secular organization that explicitly agrees anti-Muslim bigotry is a real problem, called subsection (d)(5) “entirely unacceptable for a taxpayer-funded body.” He said the provision raises serious concerns under the First Amendment and Article VI of the United States Constitution: no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
A religious test is unconstitutional in either direction. A government that screens people out of office because they are Muslim violates the Constitution. A government body instructed to recommend candidates because they are Muslim raises the same constitutional concern. You cannot defend one and condemn the other, and I am not going to try.
The bill did not advance to the Senate floor before Massachusetts’ formal legislative session ended July 31. Its sponsors say they are considering redrafting and refiling it next session. So this is not a settled question.
A commission like this is filled by appointment. Whoever influences the appointment process controls which voices the state hears, and Westrop argues that the organized, well-funded networks he has spent a decade mapping are better positioned to influence appointments than ordinary, unorganized worshippers. That is what he says these networks do. They are practiced at it. They have the staff, the donors, the professional class, and the patience. Do you? Do we?
Westrop makes this point more sharply than I can: the central failure of American policy has been that officials see Muslims where they should see Islamists, and in doing so, they fail to identify the actual Muslims who could be their strongest allies. They elevate, sanitize, and publicly fund the people who have taken control of too many Muslim institutions, and they leave the dissidents standing outside the door.
Provided by Dallas Express
