WASHINGTON — The Senate on Friday voted overwhelmingly to override President Trump’s veto of the annual military policy bill as most Republicans joined Democrats to rebuke Mr. Trump in the final days of his presidency.
The 81-to-13 vote was the first time lawmakers have overridden one of Mr. Trump’s vetoes. It reflected the sweeping popularity of a measure that authorized a pay raise for the nation’s military.
The margin surpassed the two-thirds majority needed to force enactment of the bill over Mr. Trump’s objections, and only seven Republicans voted to sustain the veto. The House passed the legislation on Monday in a similarly lopsided 322-to-87 vote that also mustered the two-thirds majority required.
The vote ended a devastating legislative week for Mr. Trump, effectively denying him two of the last demands of his presidency. Senate Republican leaders on Wednesday had declared that there was “no realistic path” for a vote on increasing stimulus checks to $2,000 from the current $600, a measure Mr. Trump had pressed lawmakers to take up.
Republicans have also divided over supporting the president’s determination to make one last and futile attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Congress next week.
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, typically a strong ally of the president, took to the Senate floor on Friday to encourage his colleagues to override Mr. Trump’s veto, calling the passage of the bill “the most significant vote lawmakers take.”
“This year especially so, in light of all of the disruptions and problems that we’ve had,” Mr. Inhofe said.
The main disruption Mr. Inhofe was referring to was the president. Making good on a monthslong series of threats, the president vetoed the bipartisan legislation last week, citing a shifting list of reasons, including his objection to a provision directing the military to strip the names of Confederate leaders from bases. He also demanded that the bill include the repeal of what is known as Section 230, a legal shield for social media companies that he has tangled with. Republicans and Democrats alike have said that the repeal, a significant legislative change, is irrelevant to a bill that dictates military policy.
Mr. Trump took to Twitter on Friday shortly after the vote to register his anger at Republican lawmakers’ unwillingness to meet his demands.
“Our Republican Senate just missed the opportunity to get rid of Section 230, which gives unlimited power to Big Tech companies. Pathetic!!!” Mr. Trump wrote. “Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need. Not fair, or smart!”
Those objections, registered late in the legislative process, infuriated lawmakers, who had labored for months to put together a bipartisan bill. They had prided themselves on passing the military bill each year for 60 years, and lawmakers in Mr. Trump’s own party ultimately moved to mow over his concerns and advance the legislation. It was a sharp departure from the deference Mr. Trump has normally been shown on Capitol Hill by members of his party.
The vote on Friday ensures that the legislation will be enacted into law over Mr. Trump’s objections, including the provision requiring the Pentagon to strip the names of Confederates from military bases that so riled the president. The bill also takes steps to slow or block Mr. Trump’s planned drawdown of American troops from Germany and Afghanistan, and would make it more difficult for the president to deploy military personnel to the southern border.
All of the Republican conference leaders voted to override the veto on Friday, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. He called the legislation “a tremendous opportunity to direct our national security priorities to reflect the resolve of the American people.”
Just seven Republicans voted to sustain the veto, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a longtime defense hawk who criticized the legislation as the product of a rushed and faulty process that failed to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demand to repeal the legal protections for social media companies.
“Some seem to have forgotten to consult with the commander in chief or recall that he has a veto power,” Mr. Cotton said last month in a speech on the Senate floor. “The bill stiff-arms the president: not a word in more than 4,500 pages about Section 230.”
Lawmakers over the past four years tried but failed to override Mr. Trump’s vetoes of legislation cutting off arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations, and to overturn his emergency declaration at the southwestern border.
But his attempt to derail the widely popular defense bill, seen by lawmakers in both parties as an opportunity to secure wins for their communities and support the military, proved to be a bridge too far. That was especially the case for those in his party who proudly championed their commitment to national security and have grown weary of the president’s mercurial demands. Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, tried on Friday to take up Mr. Trump’s demand to increase the size of pandemic relief checks to $2,000. He called for votes on both a House-passed bill authorizing larger checks and a separate measure by Mr. McConnell that lumped together three of Mr. Trump’s demands: the larger payments, a repeal of legal protections for social media platforms and the creation of a bipartisan panel to investigate the integrity of the 2020 election.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, blocked the request, underscoring the scant appetite in the party for increasing the size of the checks. The chamber then moved on to override Mr. Trump’s veto on the defense bill.
The bill contains a 3 percent increase in pay for service members and a boost in hazardous duty incentive pay, new benefits for tens of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and a landmark provision aimed at preventing the use of shell companies to evade anti-money-laundering rules.
The last time Congress overrode a presidential veto was in 2016, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, after he vetoed legislation allowing families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. New York Times
The third College Football Playoff semifinal matchup between Clemson and Ohio State turned out very differently than the first two. After two losses to the Tigers, the Buckeyes prevailed Friday in the Sugar Bowl 49-28 to set up a showdown with Alabama in the national championship game on Jan. 11.
Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields outplayed counterpart Trevor Lawrence, throwing for six touchdowns to lead an offensive explosion that left the Clemson defense bewildered. Read more at USA Today
ATLANTA — President Trump took to Twitter Friday evening to make the unfounded assertion that Georgia’s two Senate races are “illegal and invalid,” an argument that could complicate his efforts to convince his supporters to turn out for Republican candidates in the two runoff races that will determine which party controls the Senate.
The president is set to hold a rally in Dalton, Ga., on Monday, the day before Election Day, and Georgia Republicans are hoping he will focus his comments on how crucial it is for Republicans to vote in large numbers for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the state’s two incumbent Republican senators.
But Mr. Trump has continued to make the false claim that Georgia’s election system was rigged against him in the Nov. 3 general election. Some Republican leaders are afraid that his supporters will take the president’s argument seriously, and decide that voting in a “corrupt” system is not worth their time, a development that could hand the election to the Democrats. Read more at New York Times
A federal judge in Texas has dismissed a long-shot lawsuit by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) that sought to overturn the presidential election, saying neither the congressman nor his allies have legal standing to pursue the case.
The judge’s Friday night ruling tosses out what many election law experts considered a far-fetched theory to challenge the formal mechanism by which President-elect Joe Biden will be affirmed as the winner of the race for president.
U.S. District Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle issued an order dismissing the case because, he found, neither Gohmert nor his fellow plaintiffs have a sufficient legal stake in the process to justify the lawsuit. Kernodle was nominated to the federal bench by President Trump.
The judge’s ruling comes less than 12 hours after lawyers for Gohmert filed court papers arguing that Vice President Pence has far more power than the government claims to alter the outcome of the presidential election. Gohmert’s lawyers filed a notice of appeal later Friday night. Read more at Washington Post
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to be treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, collected more than $7 million in speaking fees over the past two years from major financial firms and tech giants including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Google, according to disclosure forms filed as part of her nomination.
Yellen’s was among three financial disclosures turned in by Biden transition officials that were made public on Thursday by the Office of Government Ethics. In a separate filing, Yellen listed firms and banks where she had received speaking fees and said she intended to “seek written authorization” from ethics officials to “participate personally and substantially” in matters involving them.
Yellen was the Federal Reserve chair from 2014 to 2018. Her term was not renewed by President Donald Trump. She took in the speaking fees in 2019 and 2020. Read at more at USA Today
Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski is quarantining because of contract tracing after being exposed to a COVID-19 positive person.
Krzyzewski has not tested positive for COVID-19. He did not travel with the team to Tallahassee, Florida, on Friday ahead of Saturday’s scheduled Atlantic Coast Conference game against the No. 19 Seminoles.
A few hours after that announcement, the ACC said Friday night that the game has been postponed following a positive test, subsequent quarantining and contact tracing within the Florida State program.
The Duke team, already in Tallahassee, will fly back to Durham on Saturday. Associate head coach Jon Scheyer was to have coached the team in Krzyzewski's place. The status for the 73-year-old coach is unknown for future contests, which include a Jan. 6 game against Boston College.
Duke (3-2) has not played in more than two weeks, since a 75-65 win against Notre Dame on Dec. 16. Its game against Pittsburgh last week was postponed because of a COVID-19 positive test within the Panthers program. Read more at USA Today
It was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic.
“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”
Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.
And on that day he was especially furious after being informed by Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, that it would be days before the government could give emergency approval to the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, something Mr. Trump was eager to promote as a personal victory going into the Republican National Convention the following week.
“They’re Democrats! They’re against me!” he said, convinced that the government’s top doctors and scientists were conspiring to undermine him. “They want to wait!”
Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?
The result, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and others in contact with the White House, was a lose-lose situation. Mr. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.
Efforts by his aides to persuade him to promote mask wearing, among the simplest and most effective ways to curb the spread of the disease, were derailed by his conviction that his political base would rebel against anything that would smack of limiting their personal freedom. Even his own campaign’s polling data to the contrary could not sway him.
His explicit demand for a vaccine by Election Day — a push that came to a head in a contentious Oval Office meeting with top health aides in late September — became a misguided substitute for warning the nation that failure to adhere to social distancing and other mitigation efforts would contribute to a slow-rolling disaster this winter. Read more at New York Times
PARIS — It is done at last. On Jan. 1, with the Brexit transition period over, Britain will no longer be part of the European Union’s single market and customs union. The departure will be ordered, thanks to a last-minute deal running to more than 1,200 pages, but still painful to both sides. A great loss will be consummated.
Loss for the European Union of one of its biggest member states, a major economy, a robust military and the tradition, albeit faltering, of British liberalism at a time when Hungary and Poland have veered toward nationalism.
Loss for Britain of diplomatic heft in a world of renewed great power rivalry; of some future economic growth; of clarity over European access for its big financial services industry; and of countless opportunities to study, live, work and dream across the continent. Read more at New York Times
No posts