President Donald Trump canceled a signing ceremony for housing legislation scheduled for Wednesday, arguing that it should take a back seat to voting restrictions he wants Congress to move on.
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
The housing legislation, which seeks to speed up housing development across the country, was passed by both chambers this week and seemed to be on a glide path to getting the president’s signature. He had repeatedly endorsed the bill.
Congress spent months trying to pass it, and finally reached a breakthrough deal that allowed it to pass the Senate on Monday and the House on Tuesday. Republicans had been particularly eager to incorporate it into their midterm messaging.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Senate Republicans have repeatedly said they don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE America Act and don’t have support to change the Senate rules to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass it.
Trump began trashing the housing bill on Wednesday morning.
“The Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill, which is of minor importance compared to lower interest rates, and even FISA, pales in comparison to passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump said in a separate post.
Warren, a Democrat, played a major negotiating role on the bill.
“Look, this is just more evidence that Donald Trump really doesn’t care about how hard American families are struggling,” Warren told reporters on Wednesday. “The House and the Senate have worked together to develop a bill on a bipartisan basis that would help bring down housing costs, and Donald Trump has turned his back on them.”
Among Republicans on Capitol Hill, there was at least some immediate frustration.
“He’s having a fucking tantrum,” one annoyed senior Republican lawmaker told NOTUS.
Republicans had spent months going back and forth between the House and the Senate, working through several different drafts of the legislation to try to come to an agreement.
“Trump listed housing affordability as one of his top agenda items in his State of the Union address,” a senior Senate Republican aide told NOTUS. “His own White House team helped devise this legislative push. And the president personally doused it with gasoline and lit it on fire.”
News of the canceled signing ceremony broke just hours before Trump was scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill for the event. Publicly, some Republicans downplayed the news.
“I don’t have any observation,” said Thune, who was speaking on the floor as Trump posted, when asked about his decision not to sign it.
Speaker Mike Johnson said the bill would be delayed because the president needed “a little bit more of that window of time,” and he believed Trump would sign the bill in the next 10 days.
“The housing bill is a great product ... it did have a lot of Elizabeth Warren’s preferences and policy provisions in the original Senate bill. That’s why we spent months and months doing the tug-of-war, and we wound up having 85% of the final product is conservative priorities and policies,” Johnson said.
To satisfy Trump’s desire to pass the SAVE America Act, Johnson said House Republicans are putting together a third reconciliation package that would include election-security-related measures. Republicans have used the reconciliation process twice already to pass party-line funding priorities, but some GOP lawmakers have questioned the odds of pulling off a third reconciliation package.
Rep. French Hill (R-Arkansas), who led the House’s effort on the bill, told NOTUS moments after the ceremony was canceled that Congress had just delivered on one of the president’s top priorities.
“I look forward to the bill being signed. He’s the one who picked the date. He’s obviously changed his mind on what he wants to sign,” Hill said.
Asked if he was frustrated, Hill replied: “I don’t pick the date when to sign legislation.”
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Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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