The president rejected weeks of insistence by congressional Republicans that he would finally sign the housing affordability plan, saying he would not approve it just hours before a legal deadline.
WASHINGTON (CN) – President Donald Trump said Friday he will not sign a bipartisan housing bill that has languished on his desk for weeks, just hours before the legislation was expected to become law by default.
The president’s move defies House Republicans, who have insisted that his opposition to the bill, which aims to lower affordable housing costs and increase supply, was merely symbolic and that he would eventually sign it. And it piles pressure on the Senate Republican, whom Trump has again urged to pass his signature voter ID legislation, which has long been seen as politically unwieldy.
Writing in a POST on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday morning, Trump said he would not sign the housing bill in “protest” over the Senate’s failure to pass the Save America Act, a measure that would require voters to provide photo identification and proof of citizenship and severely limit mail-in voting.
“The failure to ACT SAVE AMERICA is insane and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it!” said the president.
Trump has been fuming for months with Senate Republicans over the Save America Act, which passed the House of Representatives but remains stuck in the upper chamber thanks to legislative rules that require a 60-vote margin to advance bills. He has repeatedly called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune to end the filibuster, a demand the top Republican has so far resisted.
The president in June made the bipartisan housing bill a political football in his fight to crack down on voter ID laws. abruptly canceling plans for a public signing ceremony on Capitol Hill as Republican lawmakers held a press conference celebrating the measure.
However, House GOP leaders tried to play down concern about the bill’s future, arguing that Trump would sign the legislation and that the issue was important to him. House Speaker Mike Johnson said after a meeting with the president at the White House that “of course” he wants to reduce housing costs.
The top House Republican has repeatedly cast Trump’s blockade of the housing bill as a symbolic holdover meant to underscore his advocacy for the Save America Act.
“He has a period of time before he has to sign a bill, and he’s going to use a little more of that period of time and we’re going to go through this together,” Johnson told reporters last month, adding that the president had “expressed his priority.”
Arkansas Rep. French Hill, who led the charge for the bipartisan housing measure, similarly pushed Trump at the time, saying he wasn’t offended by the president’s refusal to sign his bill and that it was “entirely within his prerogative to do so.”
Once a bill passes the House and Senate and is transmitted to the president, he has a 10-day window to veto the legislation before it automatically becomes law. Johnson said he sent the measure to Trump on June 28, making Saturday the last day he could reject it.
The president did not directly say he would veto the housing bill. As of Friday morning, the White House has yet to make an official announcement.
The Constitution allows Congress to override a presidential veto with a two-thirds supermajority in both houses.
The Save America Act has proven a political albatross for Republican leaders in Congress in recent weeks. In addition to the Senate’s heartbreak over the controversial voter ID bill, conservative lawmakers in the House last month disrupted proceedings in the lower chamber after demanding that leadership add the measure’s language to the National Defense Authorization Act.
Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who leads the procedural gridlock in the House of Representatives, has said she will continue her stay until Johnson agrees to include the Save America Act as part of the defense bill that must be passed.
The House speaker, however, has said he thinks the voter ID legislation should be included in a third Republican-led budget reconciliation measure, a process that would allow the Senate to bypass the filibuster. But the Senate lawmaker is unlikely to allow lawmakers to keep those provisions in a budget bill.
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