President Donald Trump on Monday called on the House to move quickly on Senate-passed legislation meant to ease housing affordability, as the bill continued to sit untouched in the lower chamber for several months. The push landed just as House Republicans were preparing their own competing version, turning a long delay into a new political test.
The Senate bill passed in March with fewer than a dozen defectors, but it has since languished in the House while Republicans debated whether to take it up as written. House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier in the week that Republicans and Democrats would come together to bring a bipartisan, bicameral bill to the president’s desk, saying, “I think everybody feels like it's important, so we're just working out some nuances.”
Senior House lawmakers then unveiled a modified version of the Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on Thursday, and the House version is expected to get a vote as early as next week. Any changes would send the measure back to the Senate, where lawmakers would have to vote again before it could reach Trump. That prospect leaves the bill in a familiar place: moving, but not yet moving cleanly.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who backed the Senate effort, said the stakes were immediate. “There’s a housing crisis out there,” she said. “This bill can pass today if the House would just put it on the floor and vote on it. We need to get started, and if the House has more ideas than they'd like to add, start another bill.”
House Republicans, though, have made clear they do not want to advance the Senate bill unchanged. House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris said, “We cannot take the Senate bill to the floor,” underscoring the resistance that has kept the measure stalled even as the White House pressed for action. The House version also removed a controversial provision aimed at the build-to-rent market, after conservatives argued the language amounted to excessive government interference in the housing market.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the administration’s message had been received. “It's been sitting over there for a while and the president’s weighed in on it. I think, you know, the White House made it clear, they would like to see the House pick up and pass the Senate bill,” he said. “We’ve done what we can do. It's in the court of the House now.”
The fight now is less about whether lawmakers can say they support housing relief than about which chamber gets credit for delivering it. Trump is seeking an affordability win ahead of November’s midterm elections, but House Republicans are still trying to reshape the Senate product before it reaches the floor. If the House changes stand, the Senate will have to revisit the bill, extending a process that has already stretched from March into the fall.
