Elections have consequences: Endangered Republican turns tail on Trump

A Republican lawmaker who usually supports President Donald Trump publicly split with his own party leader on Monday over housing affordability.

“He's calling a bill that would address housing affordability — one that you support — a yawn,” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) on Monday. “Your thoughts?”

Lawler separated from the president on this issue.

“Obviously I disagree,” the New York Republican told Tapper. “This is an issue that I have been leading on since coming to Congress. Six of my bills are included in the overall bill, and I think housing affordability is one of the biggest issues that we could tackle as a country.”

After criticizing Trump’s Democratic predecessor, former President Joe Biden, by saying that under his administration “mortgage interest rates reached a 30-year high, we have cut that in half,” Lawler added that “there is more work to do. We need to increase supply, we need to increase access to capital, and we need to reduce overall costs. And that's what this bill does. It's the first bipartisan housing bill in 36 years that really tackles the issue in a substantive and serious way.”

He concluded, “I'm proud of the work that we did, and I certainly encourage the President to sign it.”

Earlier on Monday, Trump supporters and former White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley defended the president’s statement on MS NOW, only to be met with laughter.

After playing a clip of the president speaking with reporters, Hunt then turned to Hogan Gidley, a former White House deputy press secretary for Trump, who defended the president’s dismissive remarks about affordable housing.

“It is a political win, and I think he is going to take the victory lap in some form or fashion,” Gidley explained. “I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing in this country for decades. You'll remember around 65 percent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election.”

Later Gidley said that Trump is “not obsessed” with false claims of voter fraud, prompting more laughter.

Republican lawmakers have complained that Trump is burdening them with an “impossible task” by insisting that they pass the SAVE America Act, which would rewrite election laws in a manner that critics claim would disenfranchise millions of voters, as a prerequisite for signing affordable housing legislation. While the SAVE America Act does not have the votes to both pass and survive a filibuster, affordable housing is a popular issue.

"You know, I have people telling me I need to implement the SAVE Act immediately in North Carolina, in a state that has voter ID," Sen. Thomas Tillis (R-NC) told host CNN’s Jake Tapper. "[Why] do I, over the next four months, have to try to pursue the impossible task of implementing a bill that simply can’t be implemented in that timeframe?"

He added, "Why are we doing more things that undermine our confidence in elections rather than getting the strong message out that will win for Republicans this year?... Win by the good results that Republicans have produced and stop undermining the confidence in the elections. This is a bedrock of our 250-year history of success as the democracy that changed the world. Let’s not mess with that between now and November."

Speaking to AlterNet earlier in June, Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause, said that Trump’s ultimate goal is to rig the 2026 midterm elections by disenfranchising Democratic voters.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña explained to AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

Vicuña added, “I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal. You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

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