← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:01]
A
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- [00:24]
B
Spin Quest is a free to play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedge maze. I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left right or right left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico app and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened. It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to Geico. Hey guys, it's Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. I am here with our congressional reporter Joe Perdicone and our economics reporter Katherine Rampel to talk about some breaking news that we've gotten out of the Hill today and out of the White House on a piece of legislation, the 21st century road to Housing act, that had seemed weirdly not susceptible to all of the same normal Trump era forces of everything being locked down all the time and everything being ultra polarized all the time. And here we had this random housing bill that had sort of just been sailing in a bipartisan way. Little fights here and there, but basically just functional legislative process all the way up to today when the President was supposed to sign the thing. And now right at the very 11th hour, we have hit a big time snag, which is this tweet, this truth social post, I should say from the President this morning, if we can throw it up there. Today's housing news conference and signing is hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed Save America act, which I consider to be a national emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT So Joe, you're on the Hill right now. Nobody saw this coming. Can you just give us a little bit of, a little bit of scene setting for how this tweet landed among the Republicans who were gearing up to celebrate the signing of this big housing bill.
- [02:23]
C
Yeah, so no one did see this coming. I Kind of walked through at the perfect time. I crossed the second floor of the Capitol where they were set to hold this big signing ceremony in Statuary hall. And they had all the chairs and they had the flags and the stage. And right when I'm walking through, there's a staffer going, does this look good? Like, does it look washed out on camera? They're ready to begin this thing as soon as Trump, you know, know, made his way across the city to the capital. And I cross through, I go down to the Senate basement and we find out that he's canceled it through Truth Social, which he loves to do. And right when that happens, it's right as a Senate vote starting to happen. So all of them start coming through so they learn from us that this thing is cancelled. In addition to that, people had already started showing up. So you can chalk this up to bad staff work, not informing their boss that, you know, anything can happen when the President posts something on his social media account, which none of them actively use themselves. But so Virginia Fox congresswoman, she showed up like, wait a minute. And a reporter had to explain to her this thing's not happening anymore. We can see her there now. And she's just like, is this Wade? And they're. And they start breaking it down. In addition to that, Maxwell Frost, who's a Democrat, he showed up and started playing around on stage and sat at the desk and was kind of mocking the whole thing. The reason why this was hit them so hard is because they were like, here's our first, like easy bipartisan win that focuses on affordability, which Trump says is a made up word by Democrats, but which they really were like, we can sell this. We can say, look, we're doing something other than chaos. And Trump turns it into chaos. And so then I head back across to the other side of Capitol, where we're recording now. And already in like a 20 minute span, I see all the crew packing up the chairs, they're rolling everything out, and it's fully broken down. It's really impressive. I mean, it's like a Hollywood set getting broken down in a minute. And because Trump is expected to be here, there was a massive police presence. So whenever he comes to the Capitol, they lock down certain areas so he can have smooth passage through. So there were all these police all over the Capitol and all of a sudden they just scattered and it went back to normal. And then all of a sudden a bunch of Amish and Mennonite tourists in the capital were filling their spaces. Shout out, shout out. To our Amish viewers right now.
- [05:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about the actual policy that's underway here in just a minute with Catherine. But before we do that, the other surreal element to all of this is that House Republicans were having a press conference. I don't know if they were already on the stage as the tweet went out, but they were. They were up there in front of the cameras touting all the good stuff about this deal. Right. Can you. What was the story with this, Joe?
- [05:26]
C
So they were on a different stage. They were at the headquarters, which is across the street from the Capitol. So they were at the same time holding their weekly press conference where they're like, look what we're about to do, like, everybody celebrate. And they were doing it at the exact same time this happened.
- [05:42]
B
So let's hit a couple clips from this real quick. This is Representative French Hill talking up this very important bill full of, as he says, the president's own housing priorities, which the president has just keel haled. So let's see him to let the process play out. Let's show the American people what legislating looks like. Let's show the American people how you bring together and do something on a bicameral basis.
- [06:06]
A
And we did that.
- [06:07]
B
And we did that in conjunction with President Trump and his priorities, which are reducing regulation, enhancing community banks. And one of his goals announced in the State of the Union was he doesn't want a mom and a dad trying to buy that first home to find out that they were outbid for cash by some institutional investor at some big company off in New York or somewhere. And then, so they're having this press conference, then the news, maybe they were previously told by staffers in the midst of this thing, or maybe these, these lawmakers as well were hearing for the first time when they were asked some of these questions by reporters. But let's see Speaker Mike Johnson responding to the very late breaking news that the President is pulling the plug on this whole thing.
- [06:51]
A
In the process of this press conference, President Trump announced that he is canceling the bill signing for the housing bill that you all were just talking about. He said he's canceling it until the SAVE act is passed. And he called this housing bill, which passed with such bipartisan support, of minor importance. Instead, it pales in comparison to the same data.
- [07:11]
B
What is your reaction? Yeah, my reaction is the truth of the matter. I spoke to the President for 20 minutes before I went in and gave that rousing speech to the House Republicans. This morning he and I have talked
- [07:22]
D
about this a lot.
- [07:22]
B
He has expressed his, the priority and the preference of the Save America Act. We share that. We passed it three times in the House. The latest version was passed a few months ago and it has proof of citizenship to register to vote and the proof of showing a photo ID when you show up to vote. Basic issues that we probably don't need to play this whole clip. He goes on in this vein for a long time talking entirely about the Save America Act. Right. He basically says, look, we agree on the Save America Act. And then he does a lot of Trump flattery about how important that bill is. But this bill also was quite important. I mean, this is the big, other than the tax cuts, this is the big affordability type bill, as you mentioned, Joe, that they were planning on running on this, this, this fall. I mean, it passed with giant majorities in both houses. 358, 32 in the House, 85, 5 in the Senate. If Trump were to veto it, they could, they could overcome that with just the same margins again. So it's not like Trump is necessarily going to actually stop this thing from becoming law. But him threatening to do it in this way and him withholding his signature and throwing all this political wrench in keeps them from being able just to make the simple case to voters. Right. Republicans care about affordability and Republicans passed this bill to help you out with that. I mean, it's just sort of shocking on, on the political merits there. Now, Catherine, sorry to take so long before coming to you, but we should talk about what's in the actual bill here, because this is, I mean, it's, it's a big bill. It's a kind of a grab bag of housing policies. But a lot of people from a lot of different camps had seen this as having a lot of good stuff to address America's current housing crunch.
- [08:54]
A
Yes. And as you point out, there was a lot to like if you are sort of an old school deregulatory favoring Republican, in addition to the sort of more symbolic wins here, if you are trying to tell voters you care about affordability. So there's a lot in this bill that, that is supposed to cut back on red tape that make it harder for someone to buy a home. So just to give you some examples, faster environmental reviews for housing. So I think one example that I heard when I was talking with an expert about this was that if there are two projects that have both gotten an environmental review and they've been built and then there's a development in between them that is in process. They don't have that. That developer does not actually have to go through the same rigmarole because they can sort of like piggyback on the review and the regulatory gantlet that has already been gone through. There are incentives to build more housing supply side measures intended to encourage local governments and developers to build more homes. That's the kind of thing that there's a contingent of the Democratic Party, you know, the sort of abundance movement, if you will, that is in favor of this, but also a lot of Republicans who are in favor of working with developers, of being pro business, etc. Etc. In furtherance of making housing less expensive. There are reforms for building more manufactured homes, which is kind of a corner of the housing market that has probably not gotten sufficient public attention. But that I think holds great promise at the very least in again getting more homes built upstates, financing rules to make manufactured homes easier to build and finance, that sort of thing. I think in the press conference clip that you played a moment ago there's some language about making it easier for community banks to do mortgage lending, updates to other federal housing programs, zoning, regulatory reforms. There are also some measures to restrict so called institutional investment in homes. I think the cap in the final bill was something like no more than 350 homes can be owned by a single investor or by one of these big corporate investors going forward. Yes.
- [11:19]
B
Can I just cut you off real quick to say that that particular provision that you mention is the single one that was a big priority for Trump to have in this bill. All this other stuff, House Republicans, House or Senate Democrats, there were different groups that were all getting each of those other things you mentioned in. But for Trump and for some of the other populists like Senator Elizabeth Warren, this institutional investor ban was a huge part of what they wanted to achieve politically. So sorry, go ahead.
- [11:43]
A
Yeah. And I will add it is largely performative. The reason why housing is expensive is not because there are a bunch of big corporate oligarchs that are conspiring to keep people from buying homes or living in homes or what have you. It's actually a very tiny fraction of the housing market, the single family housing market in particular nationwide. It's a very easy scapegoat because who doesn't want to, you know, shake their fist at Wall street homeowners? But it's a very small piece of the market and there's little evidence that it's making any difference actually in pushing up housing costs, particularly since on net These kinds of investors are actually getting out of the market. Like, they have fewer homes today than they did a few years ago. But whatever. This is a performative thing. It's symbolic if nothing else. And the worst parts of the legislation that were in this or the worst parts of the institutional investor policy, which were about, like, requiring new developments that were supposed to be rental developments to be sold within seven years to individual homeowners, which was going to disincentivize a lot of new building that's out of this bill. So, you know, the stuff that's, I don't want to say it's toothless, but it's less damaging at the very least, is still in there. But as you point out, like, you know, good messaging, everybody gets to the populists on both left and right, both get to rail against the Wall street elite, and that's useful messaging to them. In addition to the ability to talk about affordability writ large, you have a villain that you can blame for making things unaffordable. And you are the savior of the common man who is having actual difficulty being able to buy a home. So that's what was supposed to be in all of this. I don't know that it would have been like a magic bullet, to be clear, for homeownership, particularly in the very, very near term. But on the margin, it definitely, the overall bill would have been helpful. It's not just, you know, sloganeering. It would actually have been helpful in getting more housing supply built and therefore making it more accessible to. To Americans who are currently locked out of the market.
- [13:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, would have been helpful. Is true, would be helpful, may still be true, because again, we don't know whether Trump's throwing up this roadblock here will actually prevent this thing from becoming law. That sort of remains to be seen. He would have to bring a lot of Republicans with him in his defection from this, it seems, if he were to veto it and then, you know, argue aggressively that nobody should pass it. So we'll see what's all gonna happen there. I wanna talk a little bit more about some of the policy stuff, the populism stuff you're talking about, Katherine, in a second. But before we do that, we should throw to a quick ad. So let's do that.
- [14:25]
D
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- [16:09]
B
and thanks to Sam for reading that. Okay, so this, this bill, I, I already mentioned how it's been sort of strange to watch it because it's just functioned as sort of a legislative sausage making process. And it has gotten better throughout that process. As you mentioned, Catherine, some of the actually more damaging provisions have been stripped out. It's been, it's been made a pretty good piece of legislation. Part of the reason that's happened is because it's been this sort of. Yes. And process. Right. I mean everybody basically agrees that, that housing is too expensive in America. There's not enough of it. There's this supply crunch. Everybody has different views on what policy lever you need to pull to fix that. But this bill kind of just adds up a bunch of those different policy levers. Right. And it ranges from some of those more market oriented solutions to some of Those things that people like you and I might deride as a little bit sloppy list, the ban on institutional investment, that kind of stuff. But it's all kind of in there, right? And you can almost look at there's three different camps here, right? There's your pro market types in the House, Republicans who liked it, liked those different reforms. You have some of these people who want to tweak the regulations, the Elizabeth Warren types who are also leaning into that sort of populist messaging and they get what they want. But the weird thing is that Trump himself, while he is into the sloppy list stuff, he is like the one guy in all of this who actually doesn't care about any of the actual effective policies that are underway here. I just want to play this real quick clip from Trump back in a Cabinet meeting this January talking about the idea of needing to get housing prices down. Let's talk about, oh, we're going to drive housing prices down. I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes and they can be assured that's what's going to happen. And this is not like a one off thing from the president. He talks about this a lot, that anytime the housing stuff comes up, he says, well, you know, you really want prices lower for buyers, but it'd be nice to keep prices higher for sellers and for people who are, you know, building generational wealth in their homes. And it really is the case that went like when I would talk to Senate staffers on who were involved in crafting this bill, one of the reasons that they were so reluctant for little changes, little tweaks midway through was they were like, look, we have this policy package. The White House has signed off, signed off on it. They're here for it. But we are more excited about it than, than the White House is, honestly. And like, we're worried that if we keep tinkering with it, keep tinkering with it, we might lose the president. And this is not why we have now lost the president. The president just doesn't seem to care very much about this bill. He wants to use it now as leverage to get this other bill passed. But it's just crazy. I mean, that Democrats and I'm sorry that Republicans want to run on this and the president is out here now at the very, very, very 11th hour signaling how little he cares about this particular bill. I mean, Katherine, am I losing my mind on this?
- [18:54]
A
No, no. Look, first of all, no one would mistake this president for being a Policy wonk. Obviously. The fact that he has these sort of contradictory ideas about he wants housing prices to go up for some people and down for some people, like, none of that should really be a surprise. In a different universe, it would be very funny in reality, the universe we live in, it's a little bit depressing, but we just take it for granted. But the piece of this that is so puzzling is that he keeps on stepping on his own agenda. Right? Like, even the parts of it that can be, if you squint at it, like, cobbled together to be made coherent in the way that you are describing this bill sort of was. It had the scapegoats that he wanted. It actually scratched that affordability itch. And it played to this idea that Donald Trump, while he sometimes is seen as a chaos agent, can actually bring people together to get things done. Like, on many, many levels, this would have been a major win for this president. But he just cannot get out of his own way. He is so upset, obsessed with the 2020 election, you know, things that are long ago passed that he cannot. He cannot see what is in his own interest, which is to help appeal to voters today so that his party can win this year, so that he will not be subject to impeachment again or whatever. You know, a raft of subpoenas, other things that will be quite uncomfortable for him. He cannot understand what. In what is in his own very narrow political interest. Forget all of the, you know, laudable policy objectives here. If you are. If you are Donald Trump and you are just looking out for Donald Trump, this is still a very stupid measure that he, you know, a trick that he pulled today.
- [20:49]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So, Joe, I know you. You gave us a lot of color up front for how this was landing in real time on Capitol Hill, Obviously, then you ran over here to get on this video with us. I don't know how much time you've actually been able to spend watching lawmakers try to pick up the pieces from this. But where do. Where do you see this going from here? I mean, there's been so much energy behind it. It's hard to imagine them just now letting this piece of legislation die 50ft from the finish line.
- [21:15]
C
I. I'm a little skeptical of. We've seen it floated around on Twitter that, you know, well, if Trump doesn't do anything, the bill becomes law in 10 days. That's not true. Johnson has to present the bill to him. Johnson is notorious for doing exactly what Trump tells him to do. So that's up in the Air in the event he does, if he vetoes it, if Trump vetoes something, which we've seen before, all of a sudden that changes the structure of who's willing to vote for it. It will suddenly lose a lot of votes. And I don't know if it can pass that threshold that would be required. So him throwing a wrench into this thing, and Catherine touched on this, saying he's obsessed with the 2020 election. The, the primary motivations of his second term are interior decorating and revenge. And the SAVE act is a form of revenge because it is a massive voter suppression bill, which, you know, we could spend hours talking about. But the whole concept of getting this SAVE act through over anything else, even helpful things, even politically helpful things like this bill, is that. And he blew up, you know, the, the FISO 702 extension for the SAVE Act. He's obsessed with this thing. So he's through the SAVE act, he's, he's disrupted national security and now he's disrupted Republicans political chances that are hanging by threat already. But he's also disrupted, you know, the overall welfare of the country. He does not care. It is about revenge. And so if, if members of Congress can understand that there might be a way to salvage this thing. Either that's Trump relenting in a few days, or Johnson maybe signing and presenting this thing to him and letting it pass in the 10 day window, or it's potentially something that gets included or tacked on to a funding bill, which he could also disrupt if he wants to, because he likes to do that. He's disrupted many funding bill fights, which we'll have to deal with in the fall. So there's, there's. The future of this thing, I think is a lot more in doubt than people are realizing right now, is senators are now scrambling to figure out how, how do we get this going again? Maybe that doesn't include a giant signing ceremony. Maybe that includes passing components of the SAVE act piecemeal, because there are many components of it, like national voter id that would easily pass both chambers. There are components of it that wouldn't. And most senators recognize that there's no way to do this without eliminating the filibuster, which is Trump's primary goal here. And so I think this thing's really in doubt until we have a better picture of Trump's mood. He can easily move on to something else in a matter of days. He could easily blow up something else over the SAVE act in a matter of days or hours.
- [24:15]
A
Joe, can I, can I Just ask you a point of clarification. You said that there are pieces of the SAVE act that could easily pass both chambers, including the voter ID stuff, but that would require that. How would that pass without blowing up the filibuster?
- [24:31]
C
I think there are a sufficient number of Democrats who would vote for a voter ID bill if it was standard,
- [24:39]
B
depending on, I mean, the devil would be in the details of what that voter id.
- [24:43]
C
It's a very politically toxic culture war issue. I think you've seen Democrats move in recent years to supporting concepts like voter id. Maybe not because they want to, but because they understand the, the political requirements of having something like that. It alleviates the concerns that they're, quote, weak on the border, as Republicans like to characterize it. So I think there, there are pieces that they could, they could pass. However, the loudest proponents of the SAVE act are Trump and Mike Lee. Mike Lee wants the whole thing because he's on a one man mission to make it law. Trump wants the whole thing because he wants this whole revenge piece implemented over the 2020 election. He's not doing it because he genuinely cares about the security of American elections.
- [25:30]
B
So it has been a weird, unstoppable force meets movable object thing the last few weeks to see Trump take more and more different pieces of the government and more pieces of legislation hostage to this bill. That he should know and that everybody else does know is dead on arrival, has been dead on arrival in the Senate forever. It just does not have the votes to pass. It's not going to have the votes to pass in its current form. So, yeah, it's been weird. Now I guess they're having to do these strategy sessions to say, well, look, if we peel this one bit off and stick it through, will that ameliorate the President enough that he will stop holding up everything else that we want to pass? But it's just, I mean, I feel like we, you almost can't stress enough how insane the whole situation is. Do either of you guys have any. We've gone a little longer than we even meant to. Do either of you guys have anything to add on this stuff before, before I talk us off?
- [26:16]
A
I'm just, I'm just very curious how voters respond to all of this. Are they aware of the affordability bill, you know, this, this housing bill even being on the table? Like, is it, is it just a point of propaganda that has been taken away from Republicans because they could have run on it in the fall, or is it a point of propaganda against Republicans like voters will actually be aware of this whole drama and will hold it against Republicans. And that I don't have a great handle on right now.
- [26:50]
C
I would say that I think a bill like this, the particulars of it, of anything, like if we look back to like the 20, 2018 TCJA, like 2017, voters don't really, like, get into the details of these things, but they recognize them when they get a slightly bigger, you know, tax refund at the end of the year. This is something that people would recognize and associate with maybe Trump's leadership. That's their best case scenario, when they recognize the benefits of the bill in terms of, you know, whether or not this goes anywhere. I would say we'd have to tune in to not to what the Senate's doing, but into Trump's moot. If he decides he's going to drop this in the next day or so, then that's fine and he'll just bring up the SAVE Act. You know, when they do the farm bill or when they do something else, he's going to continue to bring it up. And until they eliminate the filibuster, which we've seen and we've heard from, you know, John Th and others, there isn't, and, and now the, the senators who he's alienated by pushing them out in their primary races, like John Corn and Bill Cassidy, retiring Tom Tillis, there, there isn't going to be an appetite to bend to him on the filibuster, which is the thing they love. So the SAVE Act's going to either meet its, you know, death here or it's going to keep coming up and derailing the regular business. It's already derailed national security. Now it's regarding, you know, affordability. What's the next thing? Probably the farm bill, I was betting.
- [28:18]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, there's, there's an endless number of pieces of usually sleepy must pass legislation that could, in theory, be taken hostage here. We'll keep following it. I'll say. I don't know. I agree with you, Catherine. I don't know how the politics of this will play just on the merits. I really hope they do find a way to pass this. It does, in fact, seem like a good bill that will actually address, at least in some small ways, our housing crunch, which is important. It's good. People should be able to buy houses, you know, aside from the politics of all of this. So thanks, thanks, Joe. Thanks, Catherine, for coming on. We will continue, obviously, to follow this story. We'll probably be back here live again if the President reverses course two days from now. We'll see. But thanks to you guys for coming on. Thanks to you all out there for watching. We hope you will subscribe to the Bulwark and all your feeds. All three of us on screen have great newsletters. You can go to the bulwark.com and and sign up for any slash all of them. We will see you all next time. Happy Birthday America. It's time to celebrate and play your favorite Las Vegas casino games by American owned spinquest.com what's better than fireworks and American pie hitting a black tech in the palm of your hand and you won't lose your fingers. Over a thousand games including slots and live dealers and $30 coin packs are on sale for 10 spend spinquest.com buy American players for American players, Spinquest is a free to play social casino Boyd where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.
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A
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C
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