Hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to sign comprehensive housing legislation into law from the Capitol on Wednesday, he abruptly canceled the event, saying he won’t sign it until Congress passes a separate election security measure.
“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,” he posted on his Truth Social account.
The GOP’s marquee election bill, which requires voters to prove citizenship to register and photo ID at the polls, does not have the necessary 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has repeatedly said his members aren’t willing to abolish the legislative filibuster to lower the threshold.
Trump’s announcement took some off guard and upended the housing victory laps lawmakers had planned. House Republicans were in the middle of a press conference touting the housing legislation and other agenda items when the president sent his post.
“House Republicans are going to be the party that governs and delivers, because that’s what the American people sent us here to do,” Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said during the Wednesday morning presser.
Johnson acknowledged that Trump was “delaying” the housing signing to pursue his voter ID priorities, saying at the news conference: “He has a window of time before he has to sign a bill. He’s going to use a little bit more of that window of time.”
Thune told reporters soon after Trump’s post that he didn’t “have an observation on that.”
The president was expected to attend a Senate Republican luncheon Wednesday, where the voter ID package was anticipated to be a main topic of conversation as Trump’s push to pass the legislation continues to derail Thune and leadership’s agenda.
The president has previously threatened not to sign other bills into law until SAVE has passed but didn’t hold firm to that threat.
Trump has not explicitly said he would veto the housing bill, meaning that if he simply doesn’t sign it within 10 days — excluding Sunday — it would still become law without his signature.
