WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump arrived at the Capitol to meet with Senate Republicans on Wednesday, hours after he called off a planned signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill that GOP lawmakers were touting as an election-year achievement.
Trump's decision not to sign the bill, for now at least, made clear that he's in no mood to compromise as he pressures the Senate to move his voting legislation even though it doesn't have enough
support to pass.
“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 posted.
Republican senators were eager for a conciliatory luncheon with the president after escalating tensions in recent weeks. But the president appeared to upend their plans when he declared on social media that he won't sign the legislation until they send him his bill to require proof of citizenship for all voters.
“We'll see what he says,” said Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana as he walked into the lunch ahead of Trump's arrival. “But what is really on people's minds is affordability.”
North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis says he doesn't know why Trump is holding the housing bill “hostage” for the voting bill that “will never pass in this Congress.”
“It makes no sense to me,” Tillis said.
Trump has pressed Republicans for months to kill the Senate filibuster and focus on the proof-of-citizenship voting bill even though Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has repeatedly told him that neither has the votes. The bill would require proof of citizenship for all voters and force states to require voter identification.
Asked about Trump’s post on the housing bill, Thune told reporters, “that was his call to make.”
“What I would say is that the bill is a bill that has been worked on for a long time,” Thune said. "It’s a great piece of legislation that increases the supply of housing and the availability of credit for people to afford homes. So it’s an affordability issue and eventually I hope he finds a way to sign it.”
The White House did not immediately respond when asked whether Trump would veto the housing bill. But his apparent reversal on the measure that Republicans have touted ahead of the election is likely to only aggravate the deepening split between the president and his Republican majorities on Capitol Hill.
Trump’s post seemed to catch nearly everyone by surprise. It arrived as House Republican leaders were holding their weekly press conference at party headquarters and celebrating the passage of the bipartisan housing measure. Back at the Capitol, a podium and desk bearing the presidential seal had been set up in Statuary Hall, with around a dozen flags flanking the stage.
At the news conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he had spoken to the president for about 20 minutes earlier Wednesday and expected the housing bill would still be signed.
Trump's move on the housing bill is his latest reversal after weeks of being at odds with Senate Republicans.
Trump has blocked the Senate from confirming one of his own nominees, asked them to fund parts of his White House ballroom project despite opposition and forced them to defend his Iran war even as they question the strategy and endgame. By rejecting a public bill signing, Trump is also indicating a level of indifference to the affordability issues that are a leading concern for voters going into November's midterm elections.
Trump has also helped whittle down his own support in the Senate after endorsing primary challengers to two GOP incumbents who were previously reliable votes for his agenda — Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy. Both men lost their primaries and have since become more critical of the president.
On Tuesday, senators said they had hoped to focus on unity, not disagreements.
“If we’re going to win the midterm elections, we need to get on the same page,” Cornyn said. “We’re not on the same page now, and that I think is dangerous.”
The internal Republican conflicts come as a federal judge ruled that many of Trump’s requested election reforms are unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston ruled on Wednesday that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump’s requirements violated the separation of powers.
Adding to the tension is Trump’s increasingly distant relationship with Thune. While Thune remains popular in his conference and cordial with the president, he has spent much of his time lately telling Trump what he doesn’t want to hear.
Thune said Tuesday that while Trump and some in their conference want to see the voting bill pass, “it’s just not realistic.”
Trump has also demanded that they add a ban on mail-in ballots to the bill as well as unrelated provisions to block sex reassignment surgeries on some minors and prevent people born as men from playing in women’s sports.
“John is a leader and hopefully he can get the votes,” Trump said Tuesday on a trip to Pennsylvania, putting new pressure on Thune.
Thune devoted weeks of floor time to the voting bill earlier this year and has said he supports it. But he has repeatedly said there aren’t enough votes to scrap the filibuster that triggers a 60-vote threshold to pass most bills in the 53-47 Senate. And Democrats are uniformly opposed to the bill.
“Those are just hard realities,” Thune said. “And I think people at some point have to come to grips with that.“
Johnson said Wednesday that he had talked through a different approach with Trump in his call on Wednesday morning — putting the voting bill on a budget reconciliation measure that would only need a simple majority to pass. But the process for that is long and complicated, and Republicans are divided about how to proceed.
“I talked to the president through that in detail this morning as I have in the past,” Johnson said. “And he said, can we do it? I said, we can.”
Only a handful of senators have questioned Thune's rationale that the Senate can't pass the bill. The most vocal in that group is Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican who has amassed a large following on X with daily posts about how they should kill the filibuster and pass the bill. Several Republican senators, including Cornyn, confronted Lee at a closed-door lunch last week about his advocacy, which they said is dividing the party and creating unrealistic expectations.
Lee has also echoed Trump’s claims that Republicans can’t win elections unless the bill passes, despite the party's sweeping victories in 2024. Trump has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election he lost was stolen.
“The push to pass the SAVE America Act is not a ‘fantasy,’” Lee posted over the weekend. “It’s a plan to avoid a nightmare — one that’s coming soon unless we act.”
Trump could face questions at the lunch about his decision last week to delay Jay Clayton’s nomination to become national intelligence director. Republican leaders had hoped to quickly confirm Clayton and circumvent Trump’s unpopular interim pick Bill Pulte, who has no known experience in the field.
In the same social media post, Trump said he wouldn't sign a renewal of a key surveillance law unless Senate Republicans attach the SAVE America Act.
Republicans could also use the luncheon to push Trump on the war in Iran and the agreement with Iran to end it. Most lawmakers still have not been briefed about the deal.
“The war is going very well,” Trump said to reporters in brief remarks as he went into the Senate luncheon. “Winning by a lot and Iran is making very big concessions.”
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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
