On Monday, House lawmakers delivered a bipartisan response to President Trump’s veto on the annual on the annual defense policy bill. The House wanted to send a clear message to the White House that most lawmakers were in support of the legislation and weren’t going to back down.
If the Senate follows what the House did, this will be the second that Congress has overridden President Trump’s veto.
The defense bill is worth $740 billion, and it was voted on a 322-87 vote, with more than 100 house republicans siding with the majority.
The defense bill that the President vetoed contains- a mandate to strip U.S. military bases of names honoring Confederate figures and new limitations of the president’s right to draw down troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere — and what it didn’t — a provision repealing legal protections for giant social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter over the content on their sites.
The President vetoed the legislation because, “fails even to make any meaningful changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, despite bipartisan calls for repealing that provision,” referring to the provision regarding online content.”
The President also expressed his concerns on how the Bill was not tough enough on confronting China.
House Republicans who sided with the President on Section 230 concluded that it did not need to be included in the NDAA bill. The NDAA bill has been passed for a consecutive 59 years, and the bill is a budget and policy bill for the pentagon.
The bill also includes a 3% pay for the military, new weapon funding for districts across the country, a policy change that would dissuade China and Russia, and better housing standards and protection for military families.
