A surrogate for President Donald Trump was met with laughter when he tried to defend the Republican leader’s recent statement that an affordable housing bill is a “big yawn.”
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“Look, just for perspective: does it take a while to count ballots in certain places? Yes,” Jamie Gangel, a journalist appearing on MS NOW with Georgetown Law Professor Michele Goodwin and host Kasie Hunt, said on Monday. Gangel was describing how Trump said he does not care about the housing bill, and considers it a “big yawn,” because he wants to pass the SAVE Act to give him more control over elections.
Gangel added, “And let’s remember the degree to which the president is focused on this. There is a massive bipartisan bill aimed at driving down housing costs — or at least limiting how fast housing costs are going up. It has been sent to his desk, and we still do not know if he’s going to sign it, because he so wants the elections overhaul bill, called the SAVE Act, that he’s been pushing.”
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 said of the housing bill. “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.”
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When Hunt asked Gidley if that was Trump’s fault, he pivoted away from the question, prompting laughter from his fellow panelists. Later when Gidley insisted Trump is “not obsessed” with voter regulation, further laughs were heard.
Gidley’s comments, and the subsequent laughter, came after the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s efforts to regulate mail-in ballots on Monday. Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause, argued that Trump’s attempt to regulate mail-in voting is part of a larger pattern to try to suppress voting.
“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.”
He added that Trump’s attempts to federalize elections could also be illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña explained. “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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