Republican-led US Senate overrides Trump veto for first time

The US Senate on Friday easily secured the two-thirds majority needed to override President Donald Trump's veto of a bill on defense spending, the first time it has done so in the outgoing president's nearly four years in office.

The Senate, led by Trump's Republicans, followed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives' lead on Monday, passing the measure with a vote of 81-13.

The Senate vote during a rare New Year's Day session is a humiliating blow for Trump, who has only 20 days to go before leaving office.

Under US law, a presidential veto can be overridden if the bill in question is supported by a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress.

At loggerheads

Trump has been at odds with his fellow Republican lawmakers since he lost re-election in November after most of them failed to back his unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud or support his call for bigger COVID-19 relief payments.

The president had refused to sign the defense spending bill. worth $750 billion (€617 billion) into law partly because it did not repeal certain legal protections for social media platforms. Another of his objections was that the bill contained a provision for rechristening military bases named for generals who led the troops of the Confederacy, the alliance of the pro-slavery southern states, during the Civil War.

The so-called National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed every year since the 1960s.

 tj/rc (Reuters, dpa)