President Donald Trump on Friday said he would withhold his signature from a bipartisan housing measure after lawmakers refused to advance a separate voter ID bill that he has championed.
The housing legislation, known as the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, cleared both the House and the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support and is scheduled to become law on Saturday unless it is vetoed. However, a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump will allow the measure to take effect without signing it, according to Bloomberg.
“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump said on social media.
Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for the housing bill in June, withholding his approval to raise pressure on Senate Republicans to change their chamber’s rules and approve the separate voter-ID measure.
Even though Trump had not committed to signing the measure, House Republicans sent it to his desk on June 29, starting a 10-day countdown — excluding Sundays — for him to either sign the bill or veto it. If he did neither it would become law on Saturday.
Scrapping the signing denied lawmakers in both parties and Trump himself the chance to highlight major legislation that seeks to address voters’ concerns about costs of living. Those economic concerns are the dominant issue before November midterm elections in which Trump’s Republican Party faces an uphill battle to retain control of Congress.
Trump has struggled to convince voters his administration is addressing high costs for housing, utilities, healthcare and groceries that are squeezing pocketbooks. The Iran war exacerbated voters’ poor perceptions of the economy by spiking oil and gas prices.
Trump has said the housing bill was “fine” but indicated he still saw the voter ID bill as his true priority. Senate Republican leaders say they lack enough support to change the chamber’s rules or approve the bill.
Housing Supply
The housing bill includes measures that would curb large institutional investors’ ownership of single-family homes, streamline rules around factory-built housing and encourage localities to remove barriers to construction in an attempt to bring more supply to the troubled housing market.
Because expanding the supply of homes takes time, industry experts expect the immediate impact of the legislation to be muted. Housing costs skyrocketed in the wake of the pandemic and remained high even as mortgage rates more than doubled in recent years.
One of the most consequential, and contentious, measures of the bill would bar institutional investors with more than 350 homes from purchasing additional single-family properties. The inclusion of that measure was critical to securing the White House’s support, according to Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican.
But House lawmakers successfully stripped a controversial provision requiring large investors to sell homes built as rentals within seven years, following an outcry from housing experts and advocates who said such a requirement would limit one of the few vectors of new supply and could block construction of up to 100,000 new homes per year.
