President Donald Trump surprised everybody on Wednesday by refusing to sign the ROAD to Housing Act unless the Senate also passes the SAVE America Act. He is right to tie them together. It would be even better if he refused to sign the bill outright if the SAVE Act passes.

It is a bold move, to be sure. The press has widely characterized the housing bill as a bipartisan “win” for the Republicans and the election-security legislation as an unpopular partisan move. As soon as Trump announced his decision to tie the two bills together, housing bill cosponsor Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and the media attacked Trump as a political hit man who doesn’t care about affordability.

They are wrong. The SAVE America Act would do much, much more for affordability than the ROAD to Housing Act. The latter, in fact, would probably do far more harm than good.

The nation’s affordability crisis is caused entirely by government overspending that has unleashed inflation and driven up interest rates. That overspending results from the very election system that the SAVE Act would reform, and the bill’s opponents are trying to protect.

Although Trump has long claimed to like the housing bill, and still says so, he is right to hold it hostage for the real affordability triumph that the election security bill amounts to.

The housing bill is an uneven mixture of deregulation, re-regulation, and new spending that leans hard toward government intervention.

The bill would establish a four-year pilot program, costing $200 million, to give taxpayer money to financial institutions “to incentivize the origination of small-dollar mortgages” of $100,000 or less. It would provide “direct grants for mortgagors [home buyers] who obtain small-dollar mortgages to cover costs associated with … down........

© Townhall