Here's a story that tells you everything about where this White House's priorities are.

Congress finally did something about housing costs. A genuinely bipartisan bill passed the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32 in late June. The signing ceremony was set up in the Capitol's Statuary Hall on June 24. The White House had said Trump supported the bill.

Then, hours before the ceremony, Trump killed it. On Truth Social, he called the housing overhaul "minor" and announced the signing was "hereby cancelled" until Congress passes his SAVE America Act — a bill that would require voters to show citizenship documents like a birth certificate or passport before they can vote.

Cheaper housing for millions of Americans, held hostage to a voting crackdown.

What the housing bill does

This wasn't some partisan wish list. The bill was sponsored by Republican Senator Tim Scott and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren — two people who agree on almost nothing. It aims to lower housing costs by:

• Removing regulatory barriers that slow down home construction
• Expanding what federal housing grants can be used for
• Banning institutional investors from buying up single-family homes — the Wall Street firms that outbid regular families and turn starter homes into rentals

Scott called it not just bipartisan but nonpartisan. Republican leaders themselves framed it as an affordability bill heading into the midterms. Only 37 members of Congress — out of 535 — voted against it.

What Trump demanded instead

The SAVE America Act addresses noncitizen voting — which the reporting describes as an extremely rare phenomenon. Republican senators have told Trump the votes aren't there to pass it. So instead of accepting that, Trump declared it a "National Emergency" and stopped signing bills.

This is the same pressure campaign we covered when a federal judge blocked Trump's executive order restricting voting by mail — an order the judge ruled exceeded his constitutional authority. The vote-by-mail order, the demand for the SAVE America Act, the Justice Department suing states for voter rolls: it's one project, aimed at federal control over how you vote.

Congressional Republicans' response? Find another way to give him what he wants.

Did Republican leaders in Congress push back on the president spiking their own affordability win? Not exactly.

Speaker Mike Johnson said he spoke with Trump that morning and would help him get his election measures through a budget reconciliation bill instead — the same process Republicans used to pass Trump's budget law and $70 billion for immigration enforcement. Johnson described a plan to create a federal grant fund that pays states to adopt "election integrity" policies, and said Trump would use "a bit more" of his 10-day window before signing the housing bill.

And in the House, a group of conservatives led by Florida's Anna Paulina Luna had already voted against the housing bill — Luna said she would oppose all Senate legislation until the SAVE America Act passes. Virtually all 32 House votes against the housing bill came from that group.

Think about what that means: members of Congress voting against cheaper housing for their own constituents, not because they oppose the bill, but as a hostage-taking tactic for voting restrictions.

The bottom line

Housing affordability is one of the biggest costs squeezing American families — Republican leaders said so themselves when they passed this bill. When a president looks at a 358-32 bill to lower your housing costs and says "not until you make it harder to vote," he's telling you which one he actually cares about.

We deserve leaders who treat lowering our cost of living as the emergency — not our right to vote.

Source

Read the full report at NC Newsline (States Newsroom): Trump spikes housing bill at last minute, refusing to sign until SAVE America Act passes by Jacob Fischler and Jennifer Shutt. Photo: Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom, via NC Newsline.