He Calls a Shortage of 10 Million Homes "A Yawn"

There is a provision in the American Constitution that few people ever think about because it governs a situation that rarely occurs. If Congress presents a bill to the president and he does nothing with it for ten days, it nevertheless becomes law. The Constitution anticipated a president who remains silent. It did not anticipate one who remains silent in order to appear offended. On Friday, the deadline expired. Donald Trump neither signed the housing bill nor vetoed it. He simply let it happen. He announced on social media that he would not sign it in protest because the Senate had failed to pass his voting bill. The capital letters in his statement stand in for an argument.

The legislation in question is the federal government's most sweeping attempt in decades to reduce housing costs. Precisely in the places where jobs and opportunity are concentrated, state and local regulations have made building homes more difficult for years. The law cuts federal regulations, streamlines environmental reviews, is intended to speed up construction, and limits the ability of corporations to buy up single-family homes. The White House's own economists estimated earlier this year that the country was short 10 million homes. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 85 to 5, and the House of Representatives approved it 358 to 32. It was backed by both the real estate industry and organizations advocating for renters. The president dismissed it as a yawn and unworthy of attention.

Unimportant compared to what? Compared to a bill that would require every voter to prove citizenship. He does not have the votes within his own party for that proposal. It is not being blocked by Democrats. It is being blocked by Republicans who know how to count.

On June 24, he surprised lawmakers by announcing shortly before the planned signing ceremony at the Capitol that he would approve the housing bill only after the voting bill had been passed first. His own party was blindsided in the middle of an election year. Republicans had chosen to focus on the issue weighing most heavily on voters, only to watch the president treat their work as a bargaining chip. Tensions between him and congressional Republicans have deepened ever since, although little of it has surfaced publicly. House Speaker Mike Johnson urged him to take the biggest black pen he could find and sign his name across the bill in large letters. Johnson said he hoped Trump would sign it, but if he did not, it would still become law, and they would celebrate it anyway. At the same time, he said he understood that the president wanted to make a point, and that he was making it very effectively.

That last sentence deserves to be read twice. The second highest representative of the legislative branch praises the effectiveness of a gesture through which the executive branch dismisses the legislature's own work as a yawn.

The separation of powers was never conceived as an administrative arrangement. It was designed as a safeguard against personal whim. Liberty, he wrote, is that peace of mind which arises from the assurance of one's safety, and safety exists only where people are governed not by the will of an individual, but by the law. That is precisely what happened on Friday, although not in the way its author intended. Construction can now begin without the president's approval. His name is absent, yet the law stands. Anyone wondering where power truly resides in this republic will find the answer in that empty space.

There is, however, still a price to be paid. This week, the National Association of Realtors reported that the median home sale price in June rose 1.8 percent from a year earlier to $440,600, the highest level since records began in 1999. Rising prices have long kept first-time buyers out of the market. What this legislation does not solve is the shortage of construction workers, rising insurance costs, and wages that have failed to keep pace with housing prices. An election year lies ahead, and the administration that claimed fighting inflation was its highest priority allowed its strongest tool against rising housing costs to take effect only reluctantly.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer reduced it to one short sentence: the administration's priorities are now unmistakably clear - higher costs for American families and more power for the president himself. The president wanted to show Congress that nothing moves without him. What he demonstrated instead is that it does.