Trump cancels housing bill signing, pressures Congress on SAVE America Act

Trump abruptly canceled a planned signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill at the U.S. Capitol and said the event would stay off the calendar until Congress passed his SAVE America Act, which he called a “National Emergency.” The move turned a measure GOP leaders wanted to showcase as an election-year accomplishment into a fresh test of whether Republicans would challenge the president when his demands collided with their own legislative priorities.

The housing package had already cleared both chambers by wide margins, passing the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32. It was designed to speed or waive environmental reviews for home construction and to cap the number of already-built single-family homes large Wall Street investors can own, a mix that exposed a split inside the party between Trump’s populist pressure on institutional buyers and more traditional Republican resistance to new market restrictions. With millions of affordable homes still missing nationwide, Republicans had hoped to use the bill to show they were addressing costs that continue to rank near the top of voter concerns.

Trump had been pushing housing affordability for months. In March, he signed executive orders aimed at reducing regulatory barriers to homebuilding and expanding access to mortgages, while House and Senate negotiators kept trying to reconcile competing bipartisan housing packages. The result was a hard-fought compromise that lawmakers expected to put on the president’s desk before Trump pulled the ceremony.

The cancellation came as Trump sat down with Senate Republicans in a closed-door Capitol lunch that quickly turned tense over Iran and the War Powers Resolution. Trump and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy traded sharp words, and CBS News said Trump at one point told Cassidy to sit down. Cassidy later said he had lost his temper but would not apologize for standing up to the president, and he argued that the Senate’s Iran bill had the votes issue settled and that it was time to move on from Trump’s election-bill priorities.

Before the lunch, Cassidy, Texas Sen. John Cornyn and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis had already said the SAVE America Act did not have the votes and urged Trump to move on. The episode laid bare the strain inside the Senate GOP caucus, where frustration has grown over Trump’s push to kill the filibuster, force through proof-of-citizenship voting legislation and reverse course at the last minute on deals congressional Republicans had assumed were settled.