Video: Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA11) Says Trump Thinks Making It Harder to Vote Is “more important than our bipartisan bill to make it easier for Americans to afford a home”

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA11) on ABC News last night, talking about Trump’s refusal to sign the housing bill just overwhelmingly passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis, as well as about the Reflecting Pool fiasco.

• “Well, look, it’s outrageous. You know, the American people are struggling with rising housing costs. This bipartisan bill would help to address that. President Trump has decided that his bill to make it harder to vote is more important than our bipartisan bill to make it easier for Americans to afford a home. So, he needs to sign the bill. The American people desperately, desperately need affordability with respect to housing. I hope he’ll change his mind over the course of the next 10 days…If he doesn’t veto it or sign it in 10 days, it becomes law.”
• “It’ll provide more tools to local governments to expand access to housing at all income spectrums. It will provide more funding for HUD to uh develop and build new affordable housing. It’ll help streamline permitting and zoning to allow more housing to be built all across the country. It’s a pretty comprehensive piece of legislation that would absolutely have an impact across the country.”
• “Democrats stand with the American people. We can have both, right? We can make housing more affordable through our bipartisan legislation. And we can continue to support free and fair access to the ballot box for every single American. And the SAVE Act is not about voter ID laws. The SAVE Act would make it all but impossible for many Americans, including a lot of women, to register to vote. So it goes far far beyond voter ID laws that most states including my own home state of Virginia have.”
• “I went [to the Reflecting Pool] yesterday to to see for myself. I was hoping that maybe the green water would have cleared up by the time I got there, but I still saw the green algae-filled water. They were putting up the fences around the reflecting pool to keep the public out and in preparation to to drain it again. So, unfortunately, the promise the president made for beautiful blue water is far from the case today.”
• “I think there’s a lot of frustration on both sides of the aisle here about his failure, his last-minute decision not to sign the Road to Housing Act after signaling that he would sign it and supporting it. Republican leaders…at a press conference prepared to celebrate the signing of the bill when the president announced that he wasn’t going to sign it. So there’s definitely frustration around that.”