DEFENSE MEASURE VETO OVERTURNED
Senate votes $741B bill into law in first override of Trump
The Senate on Friday voted to turn a $741 billion defense authorization bill into law over President Donald Trump’s objections, delivering the first successful veto override of his presidency in the waning days of his administration.
The 81-13 vote in the Senate came just days after the House also voted in overwhelming numbers to back the legislation, despite Trump’s repeated protests. It takes two-thirds of each chamber to override a presidential veto.
The strong bipartisan majorities supporting the defense bill in both chambers represent a a significant rebuke of the president, as it contains several repudiations of his policies as commander in chief.
The bill contains new restrictions on how much of the military’s construction budget the president may move by emergency order — a direct response to Trump’s efforts to divert billions of the Pentagon’s dollars toward the border wall. It also limits the president’s ability to draw down troop levels in Germany, South Korea and Afghanistan — a move Trump had planned over the objections of members of his own party.
In his veto statement last month, Trump included the measure’s restrictions on troop deployments high on his list of grievances with the legislation. He also objected to the bill’s mandate to the
Pentagon to change the names of installations honoring members of the Confederacy. And he complained that the legislation did not include a repeal of a completely unrelated law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — that gives technology companies certain liability protections from content third parties post to their websites.
Trump has taken aim at Section 230 as part of a larger campaign against social media companies like Facebook,
Twitter and Google, which he has accused of harboring anti-conservative bias.
The president didn’t immediately comment on Friday’s override of his veto, tweeting instead to remind his supporters about an upcoming rally in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, to coincide with Congress’ planned certification of the 2020 Electoral College results. Supporters of the president in the House and Senate have pledged to object to the results, ensuring a drawn-out
process that will ultimately have no effect on the outcome.
The president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the progress of the defense bill have played out in parallel in recent weeks, exposing deep fissures within the Republican Party about just how far lawmakers are willing to go to support Trump as his term winds down.
For months, Trump’s objections cast a shadow over negotiations between the
House and Senate over the final defense bill, despite the fact that veto-proof bipartisan majorities had voted in favor of earlier versions of the legislation.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., in particular, argued that lawmakers would have to excise provisions ordering the removal of Confederate names from bases in order to pass the bill. But by early December, he gave up his protest — and on Friday, he cheered the passage of the defense bill over Trump’s objections.
“Not only does this bill give our service members and their families the resources they need, but it also makes our nation more secure,” Inhofe said in a statement. “I’m glad the Senate voted once again, by a wide bipartisan margin, for this bill — the most important bill we do each and every year, for 60 years in a row.”
But Trump’s veto was not the only factor that drove the Senate to override in a rare, New Year’s Day vote, less than 48 hours before the current congressional session, and all pending legislation in it, expires.
Over the last week, the bill’s passage was delayed after a group of senators, led by Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., objected to advancing a measure to authorize Pentagon funding before addressing domestic matters — specifically, an effort to raise the individual pandemic assistance payment from $600 to $2,000.
Sanders attempted several times this week to push the Senate to vote on legislation that passed in the House to increase the stimulus checks, before taking up the defense bill override.
“All that I am asking is a simple request. Bring the bill to the floor,” Sanders said on Friday. “What is the problem with giving members of the United States Senate the opportunity to vote on the legislation?”
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy., refused, dismissing the checks as “socialism for rich people” and arguing that the defense bill is the greater priority.