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The United States Congress today dealt Donald Trump a humiliating blow in his final days in office with the Senate voting overwhelmingly to override his veto on a radical defense bill, the first time lawmakers have done so during his presidency.
By an uneven vote of 81-13, far more than the two-thirds of the 100-member chamber required, the Republican-controlled Senate passed the $ 740.5 billion National Defense Authorization Act to fund the military for the fiscal year 2021.
It comes as coronavirus cases in the U.S. topped 20 million today as officials seek to speed up vaccines and a more infectious variant emerged in Colorado, California and Florida.
The United States has seen an increase in the number of daily deaths from Covid-19 since Thanksgiving with 78,000 lives lost in December.
A total of 345,000 people have died from coronavirus, or one in 950 US residents, since the virus first appeared in China in late 2019.
On Monday, the Democratic-led House of Representatives had already voted 322 to 87 to override Trump’s veto.
Both houses of Congress easily passed the legislation in early December by a strong majority, but President Trump, citing a litany of objections, vetoed it on December 23.
“It is time that we deliver this bill,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said at the beginning of today’s session.
“This is our opportunity to remember the brave service members and their families that we stand behind them.”
The vote completed a shocking rebuke in the final weeks of Trump’s presidency.
It came in an extraordinary session on New Years Day necessitated by his veto, possibly the final act of the outgoing Congress.
The new members will be sworn in on Sunday, just 17 days before Democrat Joe Biden takes office to succeed Donald Trump.
In breaking with members of his party, Trump had criticized the defense bill on numerous grounds.
He called it a “gift” to China and Russia and said it restricted their ability to reduce troop numbers in Afghanistan, South Korea and elsewhere.
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President Trump had been enraged at the language to rename the military facilities that currently honor the leaders of the dissident Civil War-era Confederacy.
He also insisted that the bill should include a repeal of a federal law, known as Section 230, that provides liability protection to internet companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, which it regularly accuses of anti-conservative bias.
“Our Republican Senate just missed an opportunity to ditch Section 230, which gives unlimited power to big tech companies,” Trump tweeted after the vote. “Pathetic!!!”
But members of the president’s own Republican Party, which traditionally prides itself on being strong on defense, underscored the importance of the bill.
“It is absolutely vital to our national security and our troops,” said Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
“Our men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform shouldn’t be denied what they need, ever.”
Democrats in both houses had criticized Trump’s veto. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, called it “an act of recklessness.”
Senator Jack Reed, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told the Senate floor today that the bill was “essential” to bolster America’s cybersecurity against the kind of widespread targeted attack recently it affected both the government and some private companies.
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