Trump signs 10 bills, all cleared by the Senate without a recorded vote before the recess

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed 10 bills into law on Tuesday, turning an Arizona national monument into a national park, requiring online dating services to warn users who were contacted by banned scammers and reopening a window for clergy to join Social Security, the White House said in a statement.

None of the 10 needed a recorded Senate vote. Congressional records show every one passed the Senate by unanimous consent between Sept. 22 and Sept. 30, the final stretch before senators left Washington to campaign for the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Five of them cleared the Senate on Sept. 30 alone. In the House, nine passed by voice vote under the suspension calendar, which is reserved for noncontroversial measures. Only one, the Clergy Act, got a roll call, passing 350 to 5 in April.

The bills are small, and they arrive with none of the 12 annual spending bills enacted and the government running on a stopgap that expires Dec. 11.

What became law

How they got there

The bills took very different paths. The Gila County land transfer, H.R. 837, passed the House on Feb. 5, 2025, and then waited nearly 20 months in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee before senators cleared it on Sept. 30. The License to Drill Act moved fastest: introduced March 5 of this year, it passed the House on June 2 and the Senate on Sept. 30, and became law about seven and a half months after it was filed. The Chiricahua bill, introduced Dec. 3, 2025, passed the House by voice vote on March 16 and the Senate six and a half months later.

Unanimous consent lets the Senate pass a bill in seconds if no senator objects, and it is how most uncontroversial House bills clear the chamber. It also means there is no roll call on the record. Seven of the 10 were first referred to a Senate committee. Three, the Romance Scam Prevention Act, the human trafficking bill and the Vicksburg boundary bill, were never sent to one, according to their Congress.gov histories; the romance-scam bill waited 15 months in the Senate after the House passed it.

Asked about the Vicksburg measure, the office of Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), who sponsored the Senate companion bill with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), pointed the Inquisitor to her releases on the bill’s Senate passage and its signing into law. The releases say the law transfers about seven acres of the park to Mississippi, which has committed $40 million to an interpretive visitor center developed with Friends of Vicksburg Military Park, along with a connector road.

The romance-scam law is the one most consumers will notice. It applies to online dating services and requires them to send a “fraud ban notification” to any member who received a message from someone the service later banned for fraud. The Congressional Budget Office published a cost estimate for the bill in June 2025, after the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved it.

The bills were presented to the president on Oct. 14 and Oct. 15, congressional records show, and he signed them within the 10 days, excluding Sundays, that the Constitution allows before a bill becomes law without a signature.

What is still waiting

The Senate has held only pro forma sessions since it adjourned, with no business conducted, and is scheduled to return Nov. 9, according to the Senate floor schedule, when it will take up a procedural vote on a permitting bill. The larger items, including fiscal 2027 appropriations, the annual defense authorization and an extension of surveillance powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, were left for the lame-duck session.

The Inquisitor sent requests for comment to the offices of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Mark Kelly, Lisa Murkowski and Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday afternoon, after this story was first published. Responses received are included above; this story will be updated with any others.

Update, Oct. 21, 2026: This story has been updated with a response from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s office.

Photo: Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona, now Chiricahua National Park. National Park Service / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.