Americans say they are sick of politics, but it might be politics that returns some sanity to American legislative performance. And if that happens, you might have Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn to thank for it, not least in the area of housing policy.
Bear with me on this.
On the one hand, we have a landmark housing bill advancing with a lopsided vote in the House of Representatives last week. H.R. 1299, better known as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. A somewhat different version had passed the Senate in March with a vote of 89–10. With lots of back-and-forth between the parties and the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, this bill is literally the most normal piece of legislation to work its way through Congress in years. Not surprisingly, it could actually help a lot of people.
The flip side is a quixotic effort by the administration to derail popular, longstanding support for revitalizing neighborhoods and businesses. More on that in a moment.
Here’s the hardball politics side of this. President Donald Trump, facing a November midterm election cycle in which Democrats practically have a golden ticket to win back the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate, has instead prioritized his vengeance tour, making a point of backing challengers against any GOP incumbent deemed insufficiently prostrated to him.
There was a time when presidents were loath to support primary challenges to sitting members of their own party, even if they hated the incumbent’s guts. But Trump isn’t about making the party great; he’s about making the party his. And that means obedience. So in last week’s Texas primaries, he endorsed not the sitting GOP senator, conservative John Cornyn, but instead his challenger Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general who apparently was more to the president’s liking. Cornyn was forced into a runoff with Paxton — the results of which will send the winner into the general election against a well-backed Democrat. Whether Cornyn wins or loses the runoff, Trump has sent a threatening signal to all Senate Republicans, and they have noticed.
Cornyn became bait in the great chum bucket that is Trump-era Republican politics.
When you are the god-king of a mythical land in a fantasy book, that pays off for you. But when you are a term-limited, lame-duck president with approval ratings around 38 percent and whose party is about to be decimated (and who launched a deeply unpopular war that is already boosting inflation), you have just made things much harder for yourself. Because Cornyn is not some Trump critic, like Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky congressman who clashed with the Trump administration on numerous occasions and who was defeated by a Trump-backed challenger last week; nor is he Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican senator who actually voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial and who also fell to a Trump-backed primary opponent.
No, Cornyn is a conservative senator who has repeatedly toadied up to Trump and who recently posted a photo of himself reading Trump’s The Art of the Deal, calling it “Recommended.” I know many authors who would be beyond thrilled to have a sitting U.S. senator endorse their book like that; and unlike Trump, most of them actually wrote the books themselves. (Actually, Cornyn posted an even more cringe-worthy message in April 2025, showing him and the president with the message “President Trump leads with vision. Senator Cornyn ensures that vision becomes law.”) But Trump was not swayed, Cornyn was challenged, and he became bait in the great chum bucket that is Trump-era Republican politics.
What, pray tell, does all of that have to do with housing? Other Republican senators see themselves more in John Cornyn than in Ken Paxton, and they see that no degree of fealty is enough if the president just wants you out. So they appear to be getting feistier in defending their congressional prerogatives, and that will make the White House work harder to get its agenda implemented.
Which brings us back to housing.
The Trump administration had raised some questions about the ROAD to Housing Act (in particular, wanting to insert restrictions on corporate ownership of single-family homes, a change that was eventually accepted), but it appears now to be on board. However, in a they-giveth-and-taketh mood, the White House is also trying to gut housing and community development funding, which is a long-standing government effort to assist in boosting economic activity in legislators’ districts. Republican senators this past week have publicly pushed back. Politico’s Cassandra Dumay quoted a bevy of GOP senators who are “disappointed” (Mississippi’s Cyndy Hyde-Smith); defended the “very effective program” (West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito); said “it’s a program worth fixing” (Louisiana’s John Kennedy); and asserted congressional power by reminding colleagues “the power of the appropriation committee is here, and we will make those decisions,” in the words of Oklahoma’s Tom Cole, who added “I can assure you, we’re not going to sustain cuts of that kind of magnitude in these programs.”
The pushback is seen elsewhere, beyond housing and development. An NBC News headline on May 22 read, “Ted Cruz says GOP senators were ‘screaming’ at Todd Blanche during ‘anti-weaponization’ fund briefing.” The $1.8 billion fund, as well as Trump’s proposed giant White House ballroom, bring to the forefront the anger and frustration of GOP senators who have been expected to die on whatever legislative hill Trump assigns to them; a GOP Senate aide told CNN, “This is a true unified front. All 53 Republican senators are not happy right now.”
So here we have the U.S. House of Representatives passing — by 396–13 — its amended version of the ROAD to Housing Act, which, if the Senate accepts it, will head to the president for expected signing. One long, hard-fought legislative battle that could end up with Congress and the White House actually making good on some of their promises to address affordability. And then you have the proposed cuts to housing and community development grants that legislators love because they really don’t have much else to show their constituents that they’re bringing home the bacon.
The ROAD experience is showing what can happen when the White House engages productively with bipartisan housing leaders in Congress; the block grants are showing what can happen when the White House tries to bulldoze its coequal branch of government, indifferent to their political realities. If Senate Republicans — and, to a lesser extent, House Republicans — are growing spines because of their fears of losing their lucrative jobs, then we might just see some useful legislation coming out of this Congress in the next year, in housing and elsewhere.
