New Delhi, July 12 -- WASHINGTON - The moment the clock struck midnight on Saturday, a sweeping bipartisan housing bill quietly became federal law, not because President Donald Trump signed it, but because he chose to do nothing.

he would not celebrate a housing measure, however substantial, while his preferred election-integrity legislation sat stalled in the Senate.

Trump's own words made that calculation plain. The day before enactment, he ranked the housing bill well below the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration in federal elections and which Senate Democrats and some Republicans have blocked from advancing past the chamber's 60-vote filibuster threshold. "Compared to the SAV...