Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle celebrated the landmark bipartisan housing bill becoming law overnight Saturday despite President Donald Trump's refusal to sign it.
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act aims to address the country’s housing shortage by increasing the supply of homes and overall homeownership. The legislation loosens regulations to encourage housing construction and limits Wall Street investors from buying homes that could go to families instead.
It passed in the Senate 85-5 and in the House 358-32, both veto-proof majorities, last month.
Trump said he was refusing to sign the bill because the Senate has not taken up the unrelated Save America Act which would make significant election and voting reforms, including requiring photo ID at polling places and proof of citizenship before a person could register to vote. The voting bill has been flatly rejected by Democrats and would require 60 votes to prevail in the Senate.
In a post on social media Friday, Trump said he would not sign "in PROTEST" over the Senate's inability to pass the voting bill.
Since the president did not sign or veto the housing bill following the 10-day window after Congress presented it to him, it became a law midnight Saturday. [snip]
"Donald Trump couldn’t pick up the pen because he just isn’t interested in lowering costs for American families," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement Saturday.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., called Trump's delays in signing the housing bill "childish," and touted the law's benefits for Americans.
"This legislation is going to lower housing costs, build more homes, and ensure working families can afford to keep a roof over their heads," she said in an X post.
A failed attempt to hold the housing bill hostage to the Malignant Fascist's election- rigging "Save America My Ass Act." This is also another case of a self-inflicted political wound for the MF, resulting from his extreme narcissism, stupidity, and moronic petulance. Well done, MAGAts!
For the Iranian regime, keeping a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be more important than the tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the Trump administration.
That is because Tehran is playing a long game. Iranian officials believe the country has finally emerged as a regional hegemon, after the U.S. and Israel failed to achieve their main goals in the war they unleashed in February. And, as long as Tehran cements this new status by securing permanent arrangements to control the vital waterway—and dominating the Persian Gulf economies along with it—then the rest, including American sanctions relief, will eventually follow.
“This is the only way: recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz,” warned Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security commission. “The Strait of Hormuz will only open with ‘Iranian arrangements,’ not American threats,” added the parliament’s speaker and the lead negotiator with the U.S., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
This attitude heralds a rocky future, with regular bouts of violence, continuing uncertainty for global energy markets and a Damoclean Sword of renewed strikes hanging over the Gulf monarchies.
“The Islamic Republic will become even more of a gangster regime. Its takeaway from the war is that concessions are won through coercion—by attacking its neighbors, threatening the Strait of Hormuz and driving up the price of oil,” said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Like Putin’s Russia, the Islamic Republic believes that its security depends not on the prosperity of its people, but on the insecurity of its neighbors.”
And, just like Russia in its own neighborhood, the Iranian regime views the oil-rich Gulf monarchies as belonging to its own natural sphere of influence—a sphere denied to it by American meddling ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Now that America has failed to protect these Gulf states from Iranian attacks, Tehran’s drive to institutionalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects its ambition to establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East. After all, the Gulf countries, to a varying extent, rely on the strait not just for their oil and gas exports, but also for other vital supplies, from consumer items to food...
We've been led to this strait (pardon the pun) by the complete incompetence of the MF and his tyro "negotiators" ("Javanka" Kushner and Steve "Witless" Witkoff) who were trying to get the semblance of a "win" from the MF's disastrous decision to go along with Bibi Netanyahu's fantasy to crush Iran with American air power. Every day this malevolent moron is in power, America suffers irreparable harm.
A Democratic senator on Saturday alleged that whistleblowers have detailed several problems stemming from rushed or improper reconstruction of the Kennedy Center, adding a new layer to the travails of the arts complex as President Donald Trump tried to seize control of it and its name.
Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said in a release on Saturday that he had received a whistleblower disclosure from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistleblower protection group, alleging that “the Center rushed a series of renovations driven by the President’s aesthetic whims and his desire to star in a series of televised events in December.”
“The Center’s subservience to the President’s desires and its corner-cutting contracting practices have resulted in steel columns that are rusting through fresh paint, a reflecting pool that may have to be torn out and rebuilt, and a brand-new bathroom floor torn out over an offending tile color,” Whitehouse continued. “This is waste, and it treats a national memorial to President Kennedy as if it were a private renovation project.” [snip]
Whitehouse released a letter he wrote to the center’s executive director, Matt Floca, demanding answers by July 23. He said the whistleblower report included “firsthand accounts of multiple former Center project managers, supported by contemporaneous documents and photographs.” He also included an 83-page appendix full of internal center documents, emails and photos of apparently shoddy construction.
The allegations include that the center rushed work before it was authorized by Congress because it wanted it to be complete for Trump to accept the new FIFA Peace Prize that the soccer federation awarded him. In doing so, the letter alleges the center didn’t follow required contracting guidelines and wasted money replacing a bathroom because the president didn’t like the color and inking no-bid contracts. One $8 million contract to replace the concert hall’s floor went to a firm with no experience in concert halls, Whitehouse contended.
Well, well. Imagine that. Shoddy construction, cutting corners, no-bid contracts to unqualified contractors, wasting taxpayer dollars. There's pay-to-play kickbacks written all over this, too. Utterly on- brand for the MF and his corrupt regime. Exposure is the first step toward accountability, and there's so much to be accountable for in this corrupt fascist regime.
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