Ink Tea Stone Leaf

On certain occasions, the impulse to talk at the world like a social studies teacher becomes overwhelming. Some point of history or civics momentarily becomes interesting to the fraction of people who pay attention to current events, and then somebody has to write a blog post or record a video about the relevant lesson from high school (which of course, nobody can be expected to remember, because the point of learning about social studies as a teenager is not to remember it as an adult). Today, that person is me. Not just me, but me too, I suppose.

I must confess that since the 2024 election, I have been preoccupied in my gloomier moments with the possibility that much of what I know about U.S. Government would become obsolete once our aspiring dictator abolished the Constitution. But that hasn’t exactly happened yet, so I’m glad to say that for the present, what I know is still relevant. And since nobody is paying me to keep my political opinions to myself, I’m free to refer to the aspiring dictator as such in the process.

On Tuesday (June 23), it was announced that the Senate and the House of Representatives had both passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act to address the acute crisis of housing in the United States. The aim of the bill is to lower costs and increase the supply of available housing, mostly by making it easier and more cost-effective to build new homes. It is most likely that ROAD will not provide visible relief to most people for several years, but there seems to be broad consensus that the changes are necessary and will be helpful in the long run. Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress support ROAD; the White House has also said that Trump supports the bill, and would sign it.

Except that some time during the night, Trump remembered that a few months ago he had threatened not to sign any new bills until Congress first passed a bill to make it harder for people to vote. That bill, the perversely named SAVE America Act, has no chance of passing in the Senate unless it first abolishes the fillibuster rule (which requires 60 of the 100 Senators to approve most kinds of legislation), something that Senate Majority Leader John Thune says that he cannot accomplish. So Trump, declaring ROAD to be significantly less important than his quest to stop the imaginary problem of non-citizen voting, says that he will not, in fact, sign the housing bill today. Alas.

So despite the fact that ROAD passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 358 to 32, and the Senate by 85 to 5, do we not get housing reform after all? What happens next cannot be known with certainty, but we can explore the possibilities, bearing in mind that there may be unknown factors at play when the president is in fact an irresponsible lunatic.

Let’s start with the Constitution’s text:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

— U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, Paragraph 2

This is the process by which bills passed by both the House and the Senate either become or do not become laws. The most straightforward result is that the President receives the bill and, approving of it, signs his name on it, resulting in a new law’s enactment. But since Trump has indicated he may not sign ROAD, other possibilities must be considered.

The Constitution does not use the word “veto,” but that is what is meant by the words “he shall return it, with his Objections to that house in which it shall have originated.” The two houses of Congress have the choice to consider amendments or changes to a vetoed bill, or to simply vote to pass it again, but in either case it requires a two thirds majority in both houses—that’s 290 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, and 67 of the 100 members of the Senate. Should they accomplish this, ROAD becomes law, overriding the president’s veto.

The majorities in both houses for ROAD are already large enough to be “veto-proof,” as they say in Washington. That’s a rare thing these days, and reflective of the interest both parties have ahead of this year’s election in demonstrating that they have taken action on the housing issue. However, the Republican party has the majority of seats in both houses, and overriding a veto by a president of their own party is politically problematic, especially when that president is still popular with the voters that the party is relying on for their re-election hopes. Trump in particular has been so effective at inducing cowardice in the Republicans in Congress that, if he were to outright veto ROAD, it’s not inconceivable that those veto-proof majorities could wither away.

However, Trump has (so far) not indicated that he will veto ROAD. He has only said that he won’t sign it, unless Congress passes SAVE first. In Trump’s preferred narrative, he is using his signature on ROAD as leverage for getting Congress to pass SAVE. A less charitable interpretation might cast his behavior as hostage taking, but the fact remains that ROAD has not been vetoed. So far.

Looking back at the Constitutional text, we see that as long as Trump neither signs nor vetoes ROAD, there are two things that can happen:

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

Assuming that the bill was “presented” to Trump on June 23rd, ten days (Sundays excepted) will have passed on July 4th. If he has neither signed nor vetoed ROAD by then, and Congress has not adjourned, then the bill will become law, just as if he had signed it. If, on the other hand, Congress has adjourned, then the bill will not become law.

Congress is not going to adjourn in the next ten days, so Trump is not going to achieve a “pocket veto,” as this maneuver is called. The margins for the ROAD act are so wide that an actual veto would probably still be overridden, even if a few thoroughly spineless Republicans changed their votes to propitiate him. His goal is probably not to kill the ROAD act, because it is popular and would help his party (which matters to him insofar as it also helps himself). So why not put his name on the bill before the ten days are up, when he will not be able to take credit for it?

From reports of today’s meetings between Trump and Senate Republicans, it sounds as though the old man is just having a tantrum. He’s angry that his threat not to sign anything before the SAVE act didn’t produce the result he wanted. He’s also angry that some members of his party have voted, along with Democrats, to challenge his increasingly disastrous handling of his war against Iran. He’s barely lucid enough to know that vetoing popular legislation would make things harder for him in the long run, so the only lever he has left to pull is to withhold his signature. That lever doesn’t do anything, but maybe he likes that. He just likes pulling it.

In the next ten days he’ll probably rant and fume, and he might threaten to veto the ROAD act. Maybe he’ll actually veto it. Maybe, in a big reversal, he’ll sign it after all. The odds are, it won’t make much of a difference in the long run. ROAD will become law, and in time it might make it easier for people to find an affordable home. You won’t have Donald Trump to thank for that.