Warren: Trump Delay on Housing Bill Shows “Complete Indifference” to Americans

On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) condemned President Donald Trump’s decision to stall the signing of a bipartisan housing bill, saying his decision “just doesn’t make any sense.”

The 21st Century Road to Housing Act, cosponsored by Warren, passed with bipartisan support on Tuesday with support from 358 members of the House. Only 32 lawmakers voted against the bill. Although it doesn’t address all of the issues affecting housing affordability, it would, among other things:

• Ban corporate investors from buying up houses and renting them out instead of selling them for people to own;
• Encourage local governments to promote homebuilding in their communities, allocating federal dollars to places that build more houses;
• And streamline regulations to make homebuilding faster.

The White House had previously announced that Trump would sign the bill into law. However, on Truth Social, the president said he was canceling the signing ceremony, refusing to enact the legislation until the SAVE AMERICA Act passed instead — a GOP-proposed legislation that purports to address voter fraud, but in reality makes citizenship requirements to register to vote so restrictive that it has the potential to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans.

“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” Trump said in his post.

Voting rights experts say that nothing in the bill would make elections more secure than they already are, and that the kind of voter fraud the president claims to be combating is very rare — certainly not widespread enough to affect electoral outcomes.

After Trump announced that he was refusing to sign the housing bill into law, Warren, who is a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, appeared on CNBC to discuss the situation.

When asked what she thought Trump was thinking in canceling the signing ceremony, Warren said she couldn’t begin to know.

“I’m sorry, if you’re asking me to get into Donald Trump’s head…you need somebody else. I don’t have any idea, it just doesn’t make any sense,” the senator said.

Warren went on to call Trump’s decision to delay signing the bill “a complete indifference to the cost squeeze on American families.”

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Trump “really doesn’t care about American families, and doesn’t care about the fact that prices are up,” Warren said, adding:

Promises he made to lower costs on day one have not only come to nothing, prices are high on groceries, prices are higher on health care, prices are higher on virtually everything Americans buy because of Donald Trump’s policies.

Frustration with the president’s decision appeared to reach Republican circles, too. In an appearance on CNN, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) indicated that he was troubled by Trump’s moves to block the bill from becoming law.

“It’s an affordability issue, and eventually I hope he finds a way to sign it,” Thune said.

However, Thune was careful not to agitate Trump, describing the choice to block the bill as “his call to make.”

Upset that the priorities of Congress weren’t aligned with his own, Trump reportedly told Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) earlier this year in a private conversation that “no one gives a shit about housing.”

That sentiment is demonstrably untrue. According to polling from the Bipartisan Policy Center conducted in May, 79 percent of voters said the issue of affordable housing is extremely or very important to them, with 8 in 10 Americans wanting legislation from Congress to address the issue.

According to the Constitution, if Trump doesn’t act on the bill within 10 days, it will automatically become law. Trump could double down on his demands for the SAVE AMERICA Act to be passed, threatening a veto of the bill unless it happens — a move that would be deeply unpopular, and potentially upset allies of his in Congress.

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