US Senate Republican’s are saying that they have secured enough votes to successfully override Trump’s veto of the NDAA.
Earlier, Donald Trump defunded the military because he couldn’t get his Section 230 repeal paperclipped to it. In response, Congress successfully overrode the veto and sent the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) to the Senate.
At this point, the question is, what will the Senate do? Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, said that he won’t support the override vote. So, the question is, is Graham going to be an outlier or is he going to influence enough Republican’s to defund the military?
Now, it seems, we are getting an answer. Republican officials are saying that enough votes are going to be secure to override Trump’s veto in the Senate. From The Hill:
The Senate appears poised to override President Trump’s veto of a defense policy bill, handing the president a stinging rebuke in the final days of his administration.
The issue is likely to come to a head either on New Year’s Day or the following day in a rare Saturday vote, with a group of lawmakers threatening to drag out the veto fight as they try to leverage the $740 billion defense measure into getting a vote on the House-passed stimulus checks bill.
But Republicans are making clear they expect to have the two-thirds majority votes needed to nix Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), marking the first time in four years that Congress has been able to successfully override Trump.
“Soon this important legislation will be passed into law. … For the brave men and women of the United States armed forces, failure is not an option. So when it is our turn in Congress to have their backs, failure is not an option here either. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation one more time,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said from the Senate floor on Tuesday.
This development appears to be the beginning of the end of Trump’s efforts to kill Section 230 via the NDAA. At this point, it would require a surprise result in the Senate to salvage Trump’s efforts on this front. If a surprise result isn’t forthcoming, then Trump won’t be killing Section 230 in the NDAA 2020 legislation. This is because Trump has no other options to put a stop to it.
This doesn’t quite put an end to Trump’s quest to kill free speech on the Internet, though. As we noted yesterday, a bill was introduced to increase COVID relief stimulus payments to $2,000. That bill has a full repeal of Section 230 embedded into the legislation. As many point out at the time, the effort seems doomed to fail in Congress thanks to Democrats holding a majority in that branch of government.
While this latest development doesn’t completely end Trump’s personally important goal of repealing Section 230, it adds another nail in the coffin of his quest. The idea that Trump will actually successfully kill Section 230 is increasingly in doubt at this stage.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
