A bipartisan bill passed weeks ago in the U.S. Senate has languished in the House, undergoing numerous revisions that might doom its chances of becoming law before the critical midterm elections.
According to a report in The Hill, that has Senate Republicans furious.
The House unveiled new legislative text last week that would scale back the Senate bill’s restriction on institutional investors’ ownership of single-family homes, despite that language being endorsed by President Donald Trump.
Should the House approve those changes on the floor, the bill would need to go back to the Senate for approval before it heads to Trump’s desk, The Hill noted.
Senate Republicans said they’re afraid that it could ultimately derail what would be the largest housing bill enacted in decades, one that Senators were hoping to trumpet as a major accomplishment in the fall election campaign.
Senate Banking Committee member John Kennedy, R-La., said that there is “an enormous amount of frustration” among his Senate colleagues and “astonishment” that the House did not take action on “a bill, which could lower housing costs in the face of an approaching election, where the cost of living is the biggest issue” for several weeks.
Delayed Legislative Priority
He said a small group of House Republicans has “raised hell” over the bill but for weeks did little to actually move it, delaying a top legislative priority, The Hill reported.
“Those who have raised the most hell in the House about the bill have done just nothing for a considerable period of time. And what I discussed with the president on Monday … [was] to see if he could get the bill moving,” Kennedy said.
Senate Republicans said they are worried the House will wind up killing their top-priority legislation by tinkering with it just months before Election Day in November. They said they fear Senate Democrats could now walk away from the legislation — which initially passed the upper chamber 89-10 — and deprive the GOP of a big policy win ahead of the fall campaign.
On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, accused House Republicans of trying to kill the legislation by watering down restrictions on institutional investors, The Hill reported.
Warren warned that changing the restriction on institutional investors “kills the bill.”
“It is an attempt to kill the bill. Changing a provision from what Donald Trump has specifically asked for and the language he has specifically endorsed and that has passed the Senate 89-10 is nothing more than an attempt to kill the housing bill overall,” she said.
Inflamed Relations
The Hill reported that relations between Senate and House Republican leaders have been inflamed for weeks because of a disagreement over how to handle the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was caused by Senate Democrats’ refusal to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol without attaching reforms to the agencies.
The two are butting heads on the housing affordability bill, just two weeks after Senate and House GOP leaders settled their dispute over a bill to fund most of DHS.
In March, Senate GOP leaders hailed it as a big economic win when they passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) touted as reform “focused on lowering housing costs and increasing housing supply” that would “unleash private-sector investment in more affordable homes.”
Republican senators have pressed House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., over the delay in moving the Senate bill during a lunch meeting last week, according to lawmakers who participated.
A Stalemate
“It feels like it’s at a stalemate right now. We just don’t want a stalemate on it,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who said the Senate bill was largely based on legislation the House passed in February — the Housing for the 21st Century Act.
“We took 80-some-odd percent of what they sent us,” he said.
According to The Hill, Lankford said the message to the Speaker at the Tuesday lunch was: “What are we doing?”
