Housing bill, voting standoff, and a court ruling on mail ballots

The Constitution's framers designed three branches to check each other — and this week, you can watch all three doing exactly that. A president is leveraging legislation against Congress. A federal judge is setting limits on executive authority over the mail. The Supreme Court is redrawing the boundary between judicial review and executive power over immigration. Public Reason's job is to give you the primary record — what the law says, what officials actually did — without the spin.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the first federal bill to restrict large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. Its 50-plus provisions also ease building and zoning regulations to expand housing supply. It passed the House 358-32 and cleared the Senate with only five Republicans opposed. President Trump was scheduled to sign it at noon on June 24. Hours before the ceremony, he canceled.

In a Truth Social post, Trump announced the signing is "hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT." The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require proof of U.S. citizenship at voter registration and photo ID at polling places. Trump and supporters say the bill is necessary because federal elections should be decided only by citizens and that without documentary requirements, there is no reliable mechanism to screen noncitizen registrants. Opponents note that noncitizen voting is already a federal crime under 52 U.S.C. § 10307 and that documented cases are extremely rare; they argue the practical effect would be to erect new barriers for eligible voters who lack passports or other citizenship documents.

Trump has also added a demand to ban mail-in voting outright. He and supporters argue that mail-in ballots introduce chain-of-custody risks — ballots sent to outdated addresses, completed outside supervised settings, and returned over an extended timeline — that in-person voting does not. Opponents say states have administered mail voting for decades with verification systems in place and that fraud rates are documented to be minimal.

The Senate has now failed to advance the SAVE America Act a fourth time. On Thursday it came up as an amendment to an immigration funding package. Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Mitch McConnell (KY), and Thom Tillis (NC) joined all Democrats to block it. Republicans need 60 votes to break a Democratic filibuster; they have 53. Majority Leader John Thune has ruled out changing the filibuster rules. Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested a third reconciliation bill, though reconciliation cannot include most election-law provisions under Senate parliamentary rules.

The Constitution gives the president 10 days — excluding Sundays — after a bill is formally presented to sign or veto it. If he does nothing and Congress remains in session, the bill becomes law. If Congress adjourns within that window, the bill dies by pocket veto — a procedural outcome that requires no formal veto and thus cannot be overridden by Congress. Trump has not threatened a veto. The clock is running.

What's Loud: After talks in Switzerland last weekend, the U.S. and Iran agreed on a roadmap toward a final nuclear deal, including IAEA inspectors returning to Iran and a de-confliction cell — a joint coordination channel where parties share military movement information to prevent accidental escalation — to manage the situation in Lebanon. Vice President Vance called it "a successful foundation." A 60-day clock is now running.

What's Missing: The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, signed June 17 at Versailles, was a purely executive action — no Senate ratification, no congressional vote. Whether that structure sidesteps the Constitution's treaty power has not been raised loudly in Washington.

What Matters: The Strait of Hormuz is open. That is the most concrete outcome so far. Whether the 60-day nuclear window holds depends heavily on Lebanon — Iran has conditioned continued cooperation on Israeli military operations winding down, and they have not.

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy advanced the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act (H.R. 9340) on June 24. The bill would authorize states to require data center companies — rather than all utility customers — to bear the cost of new power generation and grid upgrades to support AI infrastructure. Electricity bills near major data center hubs have risen as much as 267% over five years. The bill still needs full committee markup, a House floor vote, and Senate passage.

On June 22, President Trump signed two executive orders on quantum technology. The first, Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, directs federal agencies to migrate high-impact systems to post-quantum cryptography by December 31, 2030. The second, Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation, updates the National Quantum Strategy and creates a federal quantum computing program for scientific research.

In Mullin v. Doe, decided June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the TPS statute bars judicial review of most challenges to the program's termination. Justice Alito wrote for the majority; Justice Kagan dissented. DHS can now end Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. Both programs expire July 1.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston blocked key provisions of Trump's March 2026 election executive order on June 25, ruling that "no law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS." The injunction covers the 24 jurisdictions — 23 states and D.C. — that joined the lawsuit; federal injunctions apply to the parties before the court, so states that did not sue are not protected by this order. The administration is expected to appeal.

State wealth taxes are multiplying. California's Billionaire Tax Act — a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of state residents holding more than $1 billion — qualified for the November 2026 ballot on June 17, projected to raise roughly $100 billion over five years from about 200 taxpayers. Washington enacted a 9.9% millionaires' tax in March, effective 2028, and Maine has a 2% surcharge on income above $1 million. At least a dozen states have enacted new high-income or wealth-adjacent taxes since 2024 — a fiscal shift moving largely beneath the national spotlight.

The Supreme Court also decided Wolford v. Lopez on June 25, a 6-3 ruling striking down state laws requiring gun owners to obtain property-owner permission before carrying firearms onto private land. The decision extends the historical-tradition test from New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen into property-rights restrictions on gun carrying.