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California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Monday said President Trump refused to sign the bipartisan housing bill passed with overwhelming support in the House and Senate because what the legislation proposed “looks … like California.”
Newsom brought it up while he signed a state bill for affordable housing in California, telling state officials and stakeholders that the cost of construction needs to go down and that the state needs “to build more damn housing.”
“The president may not be familiar, because he didn’t take the time to sign the bill, that what we were promoting –– and by the way, take a look at that housing bill that was done federally,” Newsom said at a press conference. “Looks a lot like what we’ve been doing here in the state of California.”
Newsom referred to executive orders designed to reform the enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), two federal regulatory acts that critics have said cause too much red tape and hinder construction on new housing in the state.
The governor, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender, said he applauded the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a comprehensive measure aimed at addressing housing affordability by increasing the supply of homes and lowering costs by limiting major investors from purchasing single-family homes, among other aspects.
“And I wasn’t joking when I said, ‘Looks a lot like California.’ Which may have been one of the reasons Trump didn’t sign it,” Newsom said later during the press conference. “But I thought there was a lot of good thinking and a lot of smart work that was done on it.”
He noted that there have been “a couple good things that are actually happening in Washington, D.C.,” referring to the housing bill.
“What they did, what we’ve done, is going to feed very nicely into what the counties and cities will be doing all across this nation,” Newsom added.
The bipartisan housing bill automatically became law on Saturday without Trump’s signature. The Constitution allows a bill that has passed both chambers of Congress to automatically become law if the bill is not signed or vetoed by the president within 10 days, excluding Sundays.
The bill sailed through the House and the Senate, and Trump was scheduled to sign the bill into law at a Capitol Hill signing ceremony last month.
The president arrived on Capitol Hill and abruptly canceled the ceremony, urging lawmakers to take on his priority bill, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, and saying he would not sign the housing bill “in PROTEST.” He later called the housing bill “a yawn.”
“It’s so unimportant compared to the SAVE America Act,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “… To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
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