By admin 
Congress recently did something correctly. It passed a big, bipartisan bill to address one of voters’ big, bipartisan concerns: housing affordability. Everything was done the right way. The House and Senate committees of jurisdiction each passed their own versions, cleaned up the draft product in concert with each other, and produced a final version that, while it won’t fix the housing shortage on its own, takes a step toward making it easier to find an affordable place to live. It’s a policy win for both parties, and it could be a political boon to a party in power that needs to show voters, ahead of a difficult midterm election, that it’s capable of delivering results.
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And so President Donald Trump just had to step all over it. In a Wednesday morning post, he described the legislation as the “Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill” and of “minor importance.” Shortly thereafter, he called off a planned signing ceremony for the bill at the Capitol “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”
This is the latest episode of the president intentionally sabotaging Senate Republicans until they’ve done what he wants—or because he’s in a fit that they haven’t. What he wants them to do is eliminate or weaken the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s party-line that Democrats oppose as unduly restricting voter rights and ballot access. Since Republicans will not do what he wants, the net effect is simply that the president is intentionally sabotaging Senate Republicans in a midterm year.
“It’s sort of inexplicable to me,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn, an ousted incumbent who’s suddenly a lot more willing to say what’s on his mind, told reporters. “I don’t know if there’s a precedent for it.”
The only precedent for the president’s move on the housing bill is his similar behavior on a regular basis over the past few months. In his frustration over the Senate’s inability to eliminate the filibuster, or get him his ballroom money, or allow him to have his “anti-weaponization” slush fund, the president has pulled his own nominees from getting hearings, endorsed primary opponents to incumbents out of spite, and threatened on numerous occasions not to sign anything else until the SAVE Act is passed. After initially humoring him, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has become more explicit in telling the president that the votes just aren’t there to pass the GOP’s partisan elections bill. Trump has not been understanding.
Trump’s decision to deny himself and Congress an easy political win is mystifyingly counterproductive. But to Senate Republicans, what else is new? He’s been making their life hell too regularly for them not to see this latest bit of political malpractice coming.
“I don’t know why you’re holding a bill that’s ready for signature hostage over a bill that will never pass in this Congress,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said. “There is a huge group of people who really appreciate what the president is doing right now. And it’s the Democrat Party.” Indeed, Democrats delighted themselves on Wednesday filming content at the empty Capitol dais where Trump was supposed sign the housing bill.
“It makes no sense,” Tillis said.
Other Republicans who won’t be out of a job come January tried to put it more delicately.
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“I will stand on one leg and bark like a dog if that’s what it takes” to pass the SAVE Act, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy told reporters. “But you can’t make people vote in a way that they don’t want to do.”
Trump’s insistence that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act is real and deep. But even deeper is his desire that the Senate simply do what he tells it, whether on a bill or anything else. Trump isn’t fond of separate branches of government technically outside his control. He figures that if they have to exist, they ought to obey him. So when the Senate on Tuesday passed a privileged War Powers Resolution vote to end the Iran war, that tipped him over the edge into spitting on its housing bill.
Although Trump canceled the bill signing on the Hill, he did show up to Senate Republicans’ weekly Tuesday lunch, to which Florida Sen. Rick Scott—without informing Thune—had invited him. It went about as expected. GOP senators let slip dry smiles when reporters asked them about it immediately afterward; an unusually high number of them found it necessary to put phones to their ears as reporters stalked them. Among those willing to talk, passionate and forceful were common descriptors—standard euphemisms for Trump just ranted for a while.
Trump, per Cornyn, said that “there wasn’t really an opportunity” to ask him questions because he “spoke for an hour and 15 minutes.” But another senator scorned by Trump—Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, whom the president successfully bounced in a primary last month—found an opportunity, getting into what was described as a shouting match with the president over Iran. Cassidy, who at one point referred to the president as “brother,” told Trump he hadn’t been clear to the American people about why the war was necessary and that it hadn’t produced the administration’s stated results.
“As I recall, he did not particularly care for my comments” and “raised his voice,” Cassidy recounted to reporters. “I lost my temper.”
Otherwise, Trump faced no pushback.
It’s unclear how this impasse—Trump wanting the SAVE America Act passed, and the Senate being unable to pass the SAVE America Act—will be resolved. Most likely, it won’t be. Nor is it clear how Trump’s underlying problem with the Senate having trouble obeying instructions 100 percent of the time will get any better. Senate Republicans in competitive reelections, in fact, will continue needing to separate themselves from the unpopular administration’s excesses as Election Day approaches, while aggrieved retiring senators like Cornyn, Cassidy, and Tillis will continue to express dangerous (above-zero) levels of free thought. Senate Republicans feel that the longer this feud goes on, Trump will reap the true cost of his sabotage: a Democratic Senate.
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