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Celebrate America’s Birthday by Fighting a Wannabe King

Congress and the courts aren’t going to rescue us—but the public just might.

Congress has been so neutered during Trump’s kleptocratic presidency that the rare instances when it manages to pass any big, vaguely bipartisan legislation ought to be cause for celebration. There’s something almost quaint about Congress using its constitutional powers.

Last month, it briefly looked as if that’s exactly what was happening with the housing bill titled the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Proponents and commentators described the legislation as the most important housing bill in a generation. It promised to expand incentives and government subsidies to build affordable housing, cut back regulations that both parties agree stymie development, and place limits on the ability of large corporations to buy up single family residences to put upward pressure on the rental market. All of this was, or should have been, low-hanging fruit. In an era in which more than half of voters under the age of 30 say their biggest concern is housing affordability and in which more than half of all Americans say that buying a house in 2026 is out of reach for them, there are no political downsides for legislators to vote in favor of moderate housing reforms.

On June 22, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the bill. The next day, the House did too in a 358–32 vote. The legislation headed off to the White House for Trump to sign—and that’s, not surprisingly, where things went off the rails.

After hyping a signing ceremony scheduled for June 24, Trump suddenly took to social media to announce that he wouldn’t sign the bill until Congress passed his voter suppression legislation, the SAVE America Act—even though Republican Senate leadership has told Trump it doesn’t have the votes to pass it. The housing bill seems to have attracted Trump’s scorn because it is cosponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren. It was, Trump stated, the “Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren centric housing bill” and was only of “minor importance.”

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly asserted that Trump won’t veto the bill, and given the widespread support for the legislation in both chambers of Congress, the veto would almost certainly be overturned. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from going on the attack. The housing legislation, he said on June 29, was a “yawn.” By........

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