The Senate on Monday voted overwhelmingly to advance the chamber’s bipartisan housing affordability package, including a controversial provision aimed at limiting Wall Street’s footprint in the housing market, during the first procedural vote for the bill. Senators voted 84-6 to advance the measure, just after Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) released new legislative text for the proposal. The bill seeks to combine the House and Senate’s housing priorities with the Trump administration’s push to ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes 36 of the 40 provisions the Senate had in an initial version of the bill — many of which are shared with a House-passed housing package — along with a provision limiting institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. The new proposal also includes six additional housing provisions from the lower chamber. Several senators said they hadn’t reviewed the new language before they voted Monday, as it was released shortly before the floor vote — the first of several procedural steps that are needed to tee the proposal up for final passage in the coming days. The new text that Senators Scott and Warren unveiled on Monday is expected to be adopted as a substitute amendment and includes language that would temporarily bar the Federal Reserve from creating a central bank digital currency — a long-time goal for lawmakers on the right who have raised privacy concerns about CBDCs. The ban would expire in 2030. The White House, in a Statement of Administration Policy, said the Trump administration strongly supports the passage of the bill and if the text were presented to President Donald Trump in its current form, his advisers would recommend he sign it into law.
For today, the Senate convened at 10:00 A.M. and following Leader remarks, the Senate resumed consideration of the motion to proceed to Cal. #343, H.R.6644 Housing for the 21st Century Act, post-cloture.
The House met at 2:00 P.M. for legislative business and is taking up fourteen bills mostly from the Natural Resources Committee including H.R. 5910 – To authorize leases of up to 99 years for land held in trust for federally recognized Indian Tribes.
