Political Consequences and Future Outlook

NPR's tiny desk can't come to you. I mean it's a desk, but the tiny desk contest tour can New York City join NPR's tiny desesk contest winner, Cure for Paranoia at Warsaw this july ninth. It's all the NPR Tiny Dk ennerergy minus the office furniture Get your tickets now at tinydesktour. org So this crazy thing happened yesterday. The stage was set for President Trump to sign a big bipartisan bill to address the cost of housing in America And when I say the stage was set, it was literally set. There was a stage in the Capitol. The presidential seal was attached to the table where the president was gonna sit and sign the bill And then at the last minute The President said he wasn't going to sign it I said I' not signing the housing bill. I want to see what happens with say Look, the housing bill is Housing I made billions of dollars with housing. I know housing better than anybody maybe anywhere And that's what we're talking about on the pod today. The housing bill and the political implications of this blow up. So let's get to it Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm TamaKeith, I cover politics. I'm Stehven Masaha. I cover personersal Finance. And I'm Mara Lason, senior National pololitical correspondent. And we are recording this podcast at one hundred five PM Eastern time on Thursday, june twenty fifth. And Steven, let's get right to it What is this bill designed to do? You, this is the largest piece of housing legislation in literal decades. and it's really all about housing affordability. There's not just like one main way it tries to get to that. likeike Elizabeth Warren, senator who is co sponsoring this bill, she basically described it like a giant meatball. It's got all these different ingredients in it to try and help really ingredients that came from different Republicans and Democrats. This is truly a bipartisan bill, not just in votes, but also in how the whole thing got written and put together. And Mara, as Stehven says, this was a bipartisan bill. You have Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican sort of pushing this through together Given how little Congress gets done these days and how little of that is bipartisan. this almost seemed remarkable It was remarkable. It was almost like a cosmic joke on Congress. All of a sudden, they finally did what the public says they want Congress to do. Work across the aisle focus on a problem that a vast majority of voters want solved, like how hard it is to buy a home make compromises. But then Trump blew it up at the last moment. and the thing that's even more remarkable is that we had never heard any real policy objections from him or the White House And the White House had even praised the bill, I think, just hours before he decided not to sign it So this reminds us that this is a very personalist presidency. It's governed by what Donald Trump wants at a given moment And he wants a different bill passed the SV Act where there are not the votes to pass it. So we will get to that, but I want to dig in a little bit more on what this bipartisan bill did, you know, President Trump talked about it in his state of the Union address. He told this story of a mom from Texas who was trying to buy a house and she bid on twenty different homes only to lose out each time to private equity firms that were paying cash. He called for a ban on large Wall Street investment firms buying up homes by the thousands re asking Congress to make that ban permanent because homes for people Really? That's what we want. We want homes for people, not for corporations. Corporations are doing just fine. So Stehven, does this bill do what President Trump was asking for It does. I mean, it's not a full permanent ban, but if this bill were to become law at some point somehow now, it would put a cap. essentially. if you're a large investor, you cannot own more than three hundred fifty homes. Now how much this would actually help with housing affordability? mean Private equity is a small part of the housing market right now But it is a big slice in some areas like Atlanta. We are hearing about private equity putting down these all cash offers and making it so other people families can't really compete. And you know, there's warnings that like That could spread to other areas and this bill would cap that. And what else is in this bill? Well, the main thing it's trying to do is address housing affordability by increasing supply. So think classic supply and demand. you increase the supply ahead of demand, then you're going to lower prices. Now Congress cannot just say, hey, we order millions of new houses to get built inststead what this bill tries to do is encourage home builduing, mainly by back on some federal regulations, really making it easier for home buildilders actually start There's no actually new money in here. It's kind of shuffling old money around. and like it also has like you know, a lot of housing is actually local. So it has this provision in there that says places that build more, communities that build more, they will get more federal dollars and places that build less will get less. So ideally encouraging more kind of local innovation and changes to zoning laws. but Again, there is no new money in here. So if you compare it to like previous really big piece of housing legislation like The current bill is not like the GI bill, which isve now more than eighty years old, which had these great like kind of loan options for for veterans. And then the housing choice voucher program for the nineteen seventies is essentially section eight that does still provide financing for low income people to afford housing. This doesn't do any of that. conservative bill. It is not about government spending and expanding that. If it's anything, it's about getting the federal government out of the way to encourage more home builduilding. That's why it passed with such big margins. And that brings us to yesterday. Shortly before that bill signing ceremony, President Trump started posting. Mara, what did he say? He took to his favorite communications medium social media and he attacked the bill because of one of its sponsors, Elizabeth Warren, and he used a racial slur about her that he's used many times in the past. He said, quote, the Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren centric housing bill. went on to say that is of minor importance compared to lowering interest rates, FISA Save America act And then he went on to tell Congress to terminate the filibusters. So he's belittling The importance of housing when voters across the board say housing is one of their most important issues. He also posted today's housing news conference and signing is hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SV actct He says, which I consider to be a national emergency. And remember, he is the national emergency president He has used national emergencies as an excuse to do all sorts of things, many of which have been subsequently knocked down by the courts. And he has also, in the not so distant past, said he wouldn't sign Another bill because he wanted the Save actct passed first. So this is that actually threatened this yes, he's threatened this before, but this is the first time he's actually had a bill literally ready to go. Quite literally. And just to explain what the SAV Act would do, it would require voter ID, proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, and it would put limitations on voting by mail. Some of these provisions are popular, others are not. others divide even Republicans Republican senators just keep telling him that this bill, his Save America Act, does not have the votes to pass. So Mara, what do you make of this move by the president? I think it's an expression of how frustrated Donald Trump is on the limits of his power because he sees his powers as unlimited whether it's his own Republicans in the Senate who, although they are pretty darn loyal to him, don't do every single thing he wants when he wants them to do it, or maybe it's Iran who has not unconditionally surrendered. He can't bend reality to his will all the time. And he's really frustrated So he picked up the first tool he could which is I'm not going to sign this bill. Now at the same time, he's doing something to really undermine his own Republicans who were hoping that this bill would give them a big boost in the midterms. All right, we're going to talk more about those political implications when we get back, but first, a quick break This message comes from Kachava. It can be tough to stick to your wellness routine, especially when you're on the go. Koachava's new travel packs make it easier. Just one packet provides nutrition ready for wherever life takes you with protein, fiber, grains, probiotics, electrolytes, and more. Take your daily ritual with you. Go to kachava dot com d and use code in PR. New customers get fifteen percent off their first order. That's kachaVa. com code in PR This week on Consider this in New York, B primary wins for congressional candidates back by New York City mayor Ron M Donny, a Democratic Socialist Do his brand of politics offer a new blueprint for Democrats For far too long, we haven't been able to answer what we're fighting for, only who we're fighting And now we have the answer Souran Mam Dani, on consonsider this. listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts This week, Jesuit priest Father Greg Boyle examines how our sense of self influences our capacity for forgiveness. We're all wounded and we're broken. And how do we become friends with our wounds so that we can enter into relational wholeness with each other? Find out where Divine Grace comes from on Ye Gods with Scott Carter. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts And we're back. And Mara, as you alluded to Republicans need something to run on in this midterm election. They currently have a governing trifecta. They have the House, the Senate, and the White House. and they need to convince the American people that after November they should still have all that power. Did Trump not signing this bill just undermine those efforts I think he did if Democrats can take advantage of it If they start running ads that say, you know, Congress voted to give you help with housing, Donald Trump threw it in the garbage can Or Donald Trump says the housing bill is of minor importance. He doesn't care about people like you. I mean, there's a million iterations of this. So I think this is just yet another example of Trump saying something or doing something that Republicans really worry is going to hurt their chances in the midterms. And that does depend if Democrats can take advantage of it And I think I was even more surprised rather than him not signing the bill, the fact that he gave credit to it to a Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren, I mean this bill was so bipartisan and I kept on hearing that oh, this Everyone's going behind because of the midterms. They want this big housing legislation to go on. But again, it was Republicans and Democrats. so it's like,, they're running against each other. whoo gets credit for this at the end of the day? And he essentially handed credit over to Democrats. And I did call up Senator Elizabeth Warren after this and I asked her about him basically saying this was her bill blame Democrats and blame me in our tails to try to lower costs American families. Well bring on the blame. And Senator Warren, she did thank Republicans who worked hard to make this actually happen, but she said what really matters is actually delivering. And right now we have a Republican president that is stopping that. Owning a home is a major part of the idea that is the American dream and it's just something that feels so unattainable to so many people right now, especially young people. There was this report recently from the real estate company, Redfin. and in order to afford the average home available for sale in America right now, a family needs to make around a hundred seventeen thousand dollars a year. That's around thirty thousand dollars more than what the typical American family does make. And I mean, the median age for first time home buyers is now forty years old because of this. and As a thirty five year old renter, I do appreciate that I've not fallen behind. But you know, Trump was in Davos in January and he said, Americans would not become a nation of renters, but you know, the math is keeping us a lot of us as renters. Yeah A little more math for me. What is the median home price right now in America It's around four hundred thousand dollars, which is around one hundred thousand dollars more than it was around the start of the pandemic. That's a remarkable increase. Yeah, it's huge. You know, it seems like Trump is really misreading the room for these midterm elections. I mean, the conversations that I've had with voters in focus groups or elsewhere. I can't think of a midterm where voters have been as cynical, as angry, as bitter, feeling like not only is the American dream not attainable anymore, And the American dream is pretty simple. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can do as well or better than your parents We're in a populist moment And Donald Trump used to be pretty good at hitching a ride on that. That's how he got elected in the first place. But it seems like he's almost going out of his way to paint himself and his party As people who don't care about ordinary Americans and their struggles, and they do feel they're struggling. As I've said before, they don't think they're poor, but they do feel broke and This seems to be really tone deaf and in a normal election year, it would really hurt the incumbent partarty. We don't know if this is going to be a normal election year because we've had extreme partisan gerrymandering and the Republican partarty, you know, has other big, big structural advantages. Well, and Mara, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the fact that the president is holding up this housing affordability bill. push for An elections related bill. That's right. He acts like he doesn't care about the elections. He's even said famously, I don't care about the midterms. But that bill that he once passed, the SAave Act would give him, Republicans, the federal government a tremendous amount of new power over the mechanics of voting and critics say it would give