House overrides Trump veto on $740B defense spending bill

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The House voted Monday evening to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a $740 billion defense authorization bill, setting up the first congressional override of his presidency just weeks before he leaves office. The bill now heads to the Senate, which could vote as soon as Wednesday. If the Senate follows suit to override the veto, the bill would become law.

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The House approved overriding Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act by a 322-87 margin. That number included 109 Republican members of the House.

Trump had vetoed eight bills previously, but those were sustained because supporters did not gain the two-thirds vote needed in each chamber of Congress for the bill to become law without the President’s signature.

Congress has successfully passed the defense spending legislation for 60 consecutive years, The New York Times reported. This year’s measure passed the House and the Senate by margins surpassing the two-thirds majority necessary in both chambers to force enactment of the bill over Trump’s veto.

Trump said last week that the National Defense Authorization Act “(failed) to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions.”

Speaking on the floor just before the vote, the House Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, asked his colleagues to override the presidential veto.

“It’s the exact same bill, not a comma has changed,” Thornberry said.

Panel chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Washington, said the defense bill gave Congress a rare chance to end the year on a positive note.

“We put together a bipartisan, bicameral product that has gotten an overwhelming number of votes,” Smith said. “Let’s show the American people that the legislative process works, at least a little better than sometimes they think it does.”

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The bill affirmed 3% pay raises for U.S. troops and authorized more than $740 billion in military programs and construction. The bill passed in both the House and the Senate with margins large enough to override a veto from the president.

Trump, in a series of tweets posted earlier this month, threatened to veto the NDAA because it failed to address liability protection for social media companies known as Section 230. Trump has taken special aim at Section 230 as part of his battle against Facebook, Google and Twitter for what he alleges is anti-conservative bias, The Washington Post reported.

>>Trump vetoes $740B national defense bill

Trump also objected to the bill’s restriction of his ability to pull U.S. troops out of Germany, South Korea and Afghanistan, according to the newspaper.

The president has also called for stripping language from the bill, which allows for the renaming of military bases that honored Confederate leaders.

Cox Media Group