President Donald Trump listens during a White House videoconference with the military on November 26, 2020.
Erin Schaff | The New York Times | Bloomberg | Getty Images
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Wednesday vetoed the broad defense bill that authorizes $ 740 billion in spending and describes Pentagon policy.
Earlier this month, the National Defense Authorization Act was passed in both houses of Congress by veto-proof margins, meaning that any Trump veto would likely be overturned.
Congress must now vote again to replace Trump.
This year’s 4,517-page defense bill, which is usually approved with strong bipartisan support and veto-proof majorities, finances the United States’ national security portfolio. He was sanctioned for almost six consecutive decades.
Passing the bill at the very least guarantees soldiers’ salary increases and keeps crucial defense modernization programs in place.
Trump offered a variety of reasons to oppose the defense project. Earlier this month, he threatened a veto if lawmakers did not include a measure to eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech giants like Facebook and Twitter from being legally held responsible for what is posted on their platforms. Trump has repeatedly accused Twitter, his favorite social media platform, of unfairly censoring him.
Trump renewed the threat last week.
The president said earlier that the move posed a serious threat to the United States’ national security as well as electoral integrity, but gave no further explanatory details. Trump also said the bill favors China.
The president’s Section 230 issue came up this summer after Twitter added warning labels to several of its tweets that the alleged postal vote is fraudulent. Trump has not yet granted election to President-elect Joe Biden.
The NDAA, in its current form, does not include any measures related to Section 230.
Trump also insisted that the defense spending bill include language that would prevent the renaming of military bases that celebrate figures from the Confederate era.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Republicans, approved over the summer a clause by Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Requiring the Pentagon to rename military assets with names of Confederate symbols, the group of states that separated from the USA and fought the Union in the Civil War.
Trump, in a post with several tweets in June, rejected the idea, arguing that the Confederate names of the bases became part of the nation’s great “heritage”.
“It was suggested that we should rename up to 10 of our legendary military bases, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Benning in Georgia, etc. These monumental and very powerful bases became part of a Great American Heritage and a story of Winning, Victory and Freedom, “wrote Trump on Twitter.
“The United States of America trained and implanted our HEROES in these Sacred Soils and won two World Wars. Therefore, my government will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Famous Military Installations,” wrote the president.
Kevin Breuninger of CNBC contributed to this report.