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
Chris Stein
Donald Trump spoke only briefly to reporters before and after his lunch with Republican senators, but offered no indication he was changing course on a series of policy decisions that have upended Congress.
The president is demanding that the Senate pass the Save America Act, a bill to tighten voting regulations nationwide that has no path to passing the upper chamber. Earlier, he cancelled a signing ceremony for a major housing bill, saying he wanted Save America approved first, and has similarly tied its approval to the renewal of a key foreign surveillance bill.
Addressing the press after the lunch, Trump made a point to note that “we like our leader”. That seemed to be an endorsement of John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader whose job he has made more difficult by demanding he shepherd through the chamber legislation that does not have the votes to clear the Democrats’ filibuster.
And one GOP senator described the meeting with Donald Trump as “more of a venting session for the president”.
That and these are from Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio:
Trump and Cassidy just went at each other over Iran during the Senate GOP lunch, per source in room. Trump was interrupting Cassidy as Cassidy was calling the war a “blunder.” Other senators tried to jump in but Cassidy & Trump kept going back & forth, source said.
In addition to the below, another GOP senator (who asked to be referred to as “disgruntled”) said Trump was in a sour mood from the start, and that was only exacerbated by his interaction with Cassidy over Iran, which came as Trump was berating R’s who voted for war powers res
Per multiple people in the room: —Cassidy came in guns blazing, at one point stopped calling Trump “Mr. President” and referred to him as “brother” —Trump repeated what he’s said on social media about the housing bill, SAVE Act & the filibuster, but nobody pushed back
I’m also told that there were no direct interactions between Trump and Thune during the meeting.
Chris Stein
Asked about what the president told Cassidy when he raised his voice at him, the senator recalled that Trump made note of his recent re-election defeat, a remark he described as meant to “demean another person”.
“If the president and his team shares with the Senate and the House and shares with the American people what is going on, then that satisfies my demand. But if you say everything’s fine, but on the outside it doesn’t look like everything’s fine, it is my responsibility to the people of the United States to ask for answers,” Cassidy said.
The president offered his Republican Senate allies few opportunities to talk to him at the lunch, Cassidy said.
“The president just kind of talked and talked and talked and talked and talked,” he said.
MSNOW’s Mychael Schnell also has this on the shouting match between Trump and Cassidy:
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) confronted President Trump over the Iran memorandum of understanding, a source familiar with the lunch conversation tells me @MSNOWNews.
Cassidy was ‘yelling’ at Trump, the source said.
This source also tells me that Trump went after Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) for missing yesterday’s war powers vote, which was successful, 48-50.
But worth noting: McCormick was with Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. And even if he were at the Capitol, the resolution still would’ve been successful because McConnell was absent.
We got Trump’s version of how the closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans went earlier (“really great”).
Burgess Everett, Semafor’s congressional bureau chief, reports:
The Senate GOP meeting with Trump is not going well. ‘A total cluster f#ck,’ one person said
Trump is mad about the war powers resolution passing yesterday and he and [Bill] Cassidy are going after each other
Cassidy was the only senator who clashed with Trump today, per Sen Cramer. No one argued with him about filibuster: there was seemingly nothing new to say
Trump not happy there were absences during yesterday’s war powers vote
no clarity on how housing bill will be resolved
Republican senator Bill Cassidy describes shouting match with Trump over Iran
Chris Stein
The Republican senator Bill Cassidy, who just lost re-election to a primary challenger backed by Donald Trump, told reporter he argued with the president over the war with Iran when he visited the US Capitol today.
Speaking to reporters after the president’s lunch with the Senate GOP, Cassidy, who on Tuesday was one of four Republicans who helped pass a war powers resolution intended to prevent the president from resuming hostilities with Iran, said Trump asked: “Why would anybody vote for the War Powers Act?”
“Is that a rhetorical question, or would you like to really know?” Cassidy said he replied.
When the president demanded an answer, the Louisiana senator said he stood up and said he wanted answers from the president, noting that a conflict Trump said would last four weeks has instead lasted four months without achieving the US objectives. After Cassidy reiterated that he would vote for war powers resolutions until he received a briefing that answered his questions, the senator said: “He did not particularly care for my comments [and] raised his voice. I lost my integrity. That’s not appropriate, it’s the Irish in me. But I again matched his tone and his volume, and it went back and forth. But at some point my gut said, ‘OK, I’ll sit down’, and so I sat down and tried to de-escalate.”
Cassidy, who placed third in Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary after Trump endorsed one of his opponents, said: “I make no apologies for standing up to the president, if you will, trying to demand that more information be shared with the Senate, and more information be shared with the American people. I make no apologies for that, whatever. And if someone tries to bully me into not asking that question, I’m not going to accept that either. I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”
Retiring senator Thom Tillis was another Republican dumbfounded over Donald Trump’s abrupt cancellation of the housing bill signing this morning.
“I don’t know why you’re holding the bill … hostage over a bill that will never pass in this Congress. Makes no sense to me,” he told reporters earlier. “We’ve got to get our act together and stop surprising people and having conflicting messages.”
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.
Leave a Reply