Trump signals veto for bipartisan housing bill

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump on Friday said he would not sign a bipartisan housing bill that’s languished on his desk for weeks, just hours before the legislation was slated to become law by default.

The president’s move defies House Republicans who have insisted his opposition to the bill, aimed at driving down unaffordable housing costs and increasing supply, was purely symbolic and that he would ultimately sign it. And it heaps pressure on the Senate GOP, who Trump again urged to pass his signature voter ID legislation, which has long been viewed as politically unworkable.

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 that would severely restrict mail-in voting.

“THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it!” said the president.

Trump has for months fumed at Senate Republicans over the Save America Act, which passed the House but remains stuck in the upper chamber thanks to the legislative filibuster, which requires a 60-vote margin to advance bills. He’s repeatedly called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune to terminate the filibuster, demands the top Republican has so far resisted.

The president in June made the bipartisan housing bill a political football in his fight to clamp down on voter ID laws, abruptly canceling plans for a public signing ceremony on Capitol Hill as Republican lawmakers held a news conference celebrating the measure.

Still, House GOP leaders sought to tamp 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 following a meeting with the president at the White House that “of course” he wants to reduce housing costs.

The top House Republican has repeatedly framed Trump’s blockade of the housing bill as a symbolic hold aimed at underscoring his advocacy for the Save America Act.

“He has a window of time before he has to sign a bill, and he’s going to use a little bit more of that window 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 Representative French Hill, who led the charge on the bipartisan housing measure, similarly deferred to Trump at the time, saying he was not offended by the president’s refusal to sign his bill and that it was “fully in his prerogative to do that.”

After a bill is passed in both the House and Senate and transmitted to the president, he has a 10-day window to veto the legislation before it becomes law automatically. Johnson said he’d sent the measure to Trump on June 28, making Saturday the last day he can 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 any formal announcement.

The Constitution allows Congress to override a presidential veto with a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers.

The Save America Act has proven a political albatross for Republican leaders in Congress in recent weeks. In addition to Senate heartburn over the controversial voter ID bill, conservative lawmakers in the House last month ground proceedings in the lower chamber to a halt as they demanded leadership add the measure’s language to the National Defense Authorization Act.

Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, spearheading the procedural blockade in the House, has said she will continue her hold until Johnson agrees to include the Save America Act as part of the must-pass defense bill.

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 it’s unlikely that the Senate parliamentarian would allow lawmakers to keep those provisions in a budget bill.

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