The day so far
-
Donald Trump has derailed what should have been a major affordability win for the GOP by abruptly cancelling the signing of a landmark housing bill into law, in a bid to pressure his party to back his restrictive proof-of-citizenship voting bill – despite being told several times they don’t have the votes to get it through.
-
The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren even said of the president: “He could be over here getting a victory lap … He really doesn’t care about American families.” Cancelling its signing shows a “complete indifference to the costs Americans are facing”, she added.
-
The president brashly declared the bipartisan bill, aimed at speeding up the construction and availability of more affordable housing, was “of minor importance compared to lower interest rates, and even FISA, pales in comparison to passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT”. It’s not the first time Trump has dismissed voters’ concerns about the cost-of-living and affordability crisis, and it will be all the more frustrating for his party as it tries desperately to reset to focus on those very issues ahead of November’s crucial midterms.
-
Trump made the move before a lunchtime meeting with GOP senators, which he had already made clear was going to be focused on lobbying them to pass the controversial voter ID bill. The meeting was already set to be tense, given they’ve repeatedly butted heads with the president over massive issues from scepticism over his war against Iran, to rejecting funding for his White House ballroom, to Trump blocking them from confirming his own nominee for DNI. Now he’s delaying a major piece of legislation the party is eager to use as a selling point to show voters it is working to bring down costs.
-
If Trump fails to sign the housing bill into law within the 10-day window since it passed through the Senate yesterday, it automatically becomes law anyway – unless he vetoes it, but even then, support for the bill is so strong that Congress has the votes to override that.
-
His allies also seem to think he wouldn’t do that, including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who said he expected the president to sign the bill within the 10-day timeframe. Johnson, unsurprisingly, defended the president’s decision to hold up the housing bill as leverage for his voter ID legislation. But the Senate majority leader, John Thune, who has tried and said many times that the math isn’t there for the voting bill to go through or to scrap the filibuster in order to push it through, simply laughed and told reporters: “At this point I don’t have any observations about that.”
-
Now, House GOP leaders are having to deal with the fallout of the president blindsiding his party. We’ll bring you more as the day (and drama) goes on.
Key events
If you need a refresher on what is in the so-called Save America Act, here’s my colleague Rachel Leingang’s explainer from last month.
The bill would upend voting for all Americans in the middle of a federal midterm election year and create costly, chaotic changes for elections workers, Rachel writes.
It is a rebranded and expanded version of last year’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) act, which passed in the House but didn’t get a vote in the Senate. This year’s version includes expansive documentary proof of citizenship requirements and criminal liability for election officials from the initial Save act, in addition to a very strict voter ID requirement for casting a ballot and a provision that requires states to regularly turn their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security.
Every voter would be affected by the Save America Act, Xavier Persad, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Rachel, “regardless of political affiliation, all across the country”. It could disenfranchise potentially tens of millions of valid US voters, he said, as people would face more barriers to voting at every step of the process.
“It is a sweeping effort to solve a problem that doesn’t exist that would require a vast, expensive new bureaucracy to be built in a short few months before a major election,” said David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Here’s what the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave, had to say in support of the housing bill last night that Trump abruptly shelved and called “of minor importance” this morning.
Posting it full as I think it illustrates really well why many – from both parties – have found the president’s decision today pretty baffling.
Tomorrow at 12PM on Capitol Hill, President Trump will sign into law the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history.
This bipartisan bill includes policies long championed by the President. It cuts unnecessary red tape, helps increase housing supply, and limits the ability of large institutional investors to purchase single-family homes.
As the President has said, homes should be owned by American families, not large corporations.
President Trump promised to lower housing costs, and he is delivering, making it easier for every family to achieve the American Dream of homeownership.
Tomorrow’s historic bill signing is another promise made, promise kept.
Trump touts ‘great’ meeting with GOP lawmakers – but doesn’t mention housing or voting bills
Donald Trump emerged from the closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans rambling about oil prices and talks with Iran in brief remarks to the press – but said nothing on the housing bill he was supposed to sign this morning, or the controversial voting bill he shelved it for.
“We had a really great meeting, and we’re very proud of the party, we like our leader, we like everybody, really, in the room. I don’t like a few people, but that’s OK. I think you know who they are,” the president said.
He added that the GOP is a “well-unified party” and went on to claim, as he often does, that the US is the “hottest country in the world”.
We have more factories being built right now than we have at any point at any time in the history of our country, and all of those factories are opening up soon. It’s all jobs, and our job numbers are incredible. Anyway, I see that oil just broke the $70 number. Who would have thought that was going to happen? And that’s during a war, and Iran is being very nice. They’re agreeing to everything that I want, and they have to.
But is the Republican party agreeing to everything he wants and do they have to? That is the question and on that, Trump gave nothing away.
Federal judge orders Trump administration to explain tarp obscuring Kennedy Center facade
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to explain why it placed a tarp over the Kennedy Center’s facade after the president’s name was removed from the building under a court order.
The US district judge Christopher Cooper said the administration must report by 31 July “the purpose and status of the tarp and scaffolding” now in place at the iconic building.
The tarp was installed as workers stripped Donald Trump’s name in a predawn operation earlier this month following an order from Cooper that the administration had unlawfully added his name to the facade in December.
The White House and Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
In a lawsuit brought by Democratic representative Joyce Beatty, a Kennedy Center board member, the judge last month ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the complex’s signage and blocked his plans to close it for two years of renovations starting 4 July.
Beatty’s lawyers this week in a filing told the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit that the “semi-permanent tarp” obscuring the late president John F Kennedy’s name from public view at the center appears to be the Trump administration’s “effort to frustrate the restoration of the status quo as it existed prior to the renaming”.
Beatty called the obstruction of the facade an “act of petty defiance”.
Here’s my colleague Chris Stein’s report as Trump holds up one of the biggest efforts in decades to increase the supply of housing and reduce prices, all to push the Senate to approve a bill that would dramatically change voting regulations by requiring proof of citizenship at voter registration and significantly curtail mail-in voting.
A reminder that while Donald Trump labelled the housing bill “Warren-centric” earlier, it actually cleared both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support after months of negotiations – not at all a common occurrence in this hyper-partisan congressional era.
Indeed, both parties were excited to celebrate the first major piece of housing legislation to be adopted in more than 30 years as a means to making housing more affordable.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said on the chamber floor after Trump’s announcement:
Any time there’s an opportunity for Trump to help the American people he runs the other way.
And the senator Susan Collins of Maine, among the most vulnerable Republicans running for re-election this year, called the president’s announcement a “complete surprise”, pointing out that the bill “has strong bipartisan, bicameral support”.
While some hard-line GOP lawmakers are cheering Donald Trump’s decision to delay the bipartisan housing bill over the so-called Save America Act, other Republicans are privately dumbfounded and disappointed, NBC News reports.
“What a s— show … Crazy crazy crazy,” one House Republican said in a text. “A once in a generation housing bill falls victim to the nuts.”
Another expressed less surprise: “Trump did something outrageous to keep the spotlight focused on him. Shocker.”
And a third House Republican, who represents a district Trump won handily in 2024, warned about the potential consequences for November. “I’m not that safe. No incumbent is safe. People are pissed off that we are not taking care of business.”
The Democratic senator Chris Murphy has this reaction to Trump’s cancellation of the housing bill signing today:
That Trump is willing to let people stay homeless in order to get his election rigging bill passed is the least surprising thing that’s happened in Washington this month.
Tracie McMillan
Tenants at apartment complexes operated by Greystar, the largest owner and manager of apartments in the US, don’t just pay rent. They pay a mass of fees that many renters have never heard of before.
These add-ons include “boiler management fees”, “variable refrigerant flow fees”, “solar rebill” fees, even “lifestyle fees”. Tenants and lawsuits in multiple states call many of these fees inflated, illegal, predatory or overwhelming.
Long lists of fees are common at buildings operated by Greystar, a private equity-backed conglomerate that owns or manages more than 1m apartments across the US. According to tenants, housing attorneys, public officials and court claims, this tangle of extra charges fattens the company’s bottom line, increases renters’ risks of eviction and undermines fair competition in the apartment market by muddying the real price they pay for shelter.
The added costs that tenants at Greystar-branded complexes pay are part of a rising tide of fees that have soaked nearly every corner of the US economy. Online and at bricks-and-mortar businesses, Americans are compelled to pay a deluge of extra charges – processing fees, delivery fees, service fees, overdraft fees, activation fees, termination fees, “convenience” fees and more.
Trump arrives for closed-door Senate lunch amid standoff over voter bill
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has arrived at the US Capitol for a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans following his abrupt cancellation of a plan to sign a bipartisan bill aimed at lowering the cost of housing.
Trump, who is demanding the Senate approve his Save America Act, which would overhaul US election rules and elections, told reporters:
“Every election is important … They want a lot of communists to come in … The people that they’re pushing are communists and this country is not going to have communists.”
The New York attorney general, Leticia James, said she was thankful for Judge Denise Casper’s decision to block an “unconstitutional attempt to seize control of our elections”.
“Generations of Americans fought tirelessly for the right to vote, and we honor their legacy by protecting that right against anyone who tries to undermine it,” James added.
A federal judge has permanently blocked most of Donald Trump’s executive order on elections, including a requirement that voters show proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
The Boston-based judge Denise Casper ruled that the US constitution gives states and Congress – not the president – the authority to set election rules. She also rejected the administration’s argument that the lawsuit was filed too early by several Democratic state attorneys general.
In her ruling, Casper wrote that the constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections”, the Associated Press reports.
A three-star navy rear-admiral fired by Pete Hegseth last year in the defense secretary’s purge of senior US military officials has won the Democratic primary in a closely watched congressional race.
Nancy Lacore secured the party’s nomination for the US House of Representatives in South Carolina’s first congressional district on Tuesday after defeating Mac Deford, a US Coast Guard veteran, in a runoff.
Lacore’s focus will now turn to November, when she will lead an ambitious Democratic bid to flip the Republican seat in the US midterm elections.
The district is currently represented by the Republican Nancy Mace, who chose to forgo seeking re-election to focus on her failed challenge for South Carolina governor. Jenny Costa Honeycutt, a member of Charleston county council, secured the Republican nomination for the election on Tuesday.
The day so far
-
Donald Trump has derailed what should have been a major affordability win for the GOP by abruptly cancelling the signing of a landmark housing bill into law, in a bid to pressure his party to back his restrictive proof-of-citizenship voting bill – despite being told several times they don’t have the votes to get it through.
-
The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren even said of the president: “He could be over here getting a victory lap … He really doesn’t care about American families.” Cancelling its signing shows a “complete indifference to the costs Americans are facing”, she added.
-
The president brashly declared the bipartisan bill, aimed at speeding up the construction and availability of more affordable housing, was “of minor importance compared to lower interest rates, and even FISA, pales in comparison to passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT”. It’s not the first time Trump has dismissed voters’ concerns about the cost-of-living and affordability crisis, and it will be all the more frustrating for his party as it tries desperately to reset to focus on those very issues ahead of November’s crucial midterms.
-
Trump made the move before a lunchtime meeting with GOP senators, which he had already made clear was going to be focused on lobbying them to pass the controversial voter ID bill. The meeting was already set to be tense, given they’ve repeatedly butted heads with the president over massive issues from scepticism over his war against Iran, to rejecting funding for his White House ballroom, to Trump blocking them from confirming his own nominee for DNI. Now he’s delaying a major piece of legislation the party is eager to use as a selling point to show voters it is working to bring down costs.
-
If Trump fails to sign the housing bill into law within the 10-day window since it passed through the Senate yesterday, it automatically becomes law anyway – unless he vetoes it, but even then, support for the bill is so strong that Congress has the votes to override that.
-
His allies also seem to think he wouldn’t do that, including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who said he expected the president to sign the bill within the 10-day timeframe. Johnson, unsurprisingly, defended the president’s decision to hold up the housing bill as leverage for his voter ID legislation. But the Senate majority leader, John Thune, who has tried and said many times that the math isn’t there for the voting bill to go through or to scrap the filibuster in order to push it through, simply laughed and told reporters: “At this point I don’t have any observations about that.”
-
Now, House GOP leaders are having to deal with the fallout of the president blindsiding his party. We’ll bring you more as the day (and drama) goes on.
GOP representative French Hill was touting the bipartisan housing bill as “a real win” and the president’s support for it at the party leaders’ news conference earlier, unaware that Donald Trump had moments ago cancelled his signing it into law.
Hill, who spearheaded the bill, later said “I’m not disappointed” about Trump’s decision to pull the signing.
The president chose, for a reason known to him, about what’s going on in the Senate, chose to delay the signing while he meets with the Senate and works on some other priorities of his. That’s fully in his prerogative to do that. I don’t find that personally offensive.
