The House voted Thursday not to overturn a pair of vetoes President Donald Trump made to legislation on a Colorado water pipeline and a Florida flood control project — despite Congress passing the bills with no objections last month.
The votes represented the first attempted veto overrides of the Republican-controlled House, following what were Trump’s first vetoes of his second term in office. And while Trump has acknowledged that his vetoes were for political reasons, most of the House GOP declined to override him.
The vote to uphold the veto of a water infrastructure project bill in Colorado, which is currently ensnared in the administration’s fight with the state’s congressional delegation over cuts to a local climate center, got 248 votes, short of the 285 two-thirds majority needed for an override. Just 35 Republicans joined all 213 Democrats in voting for it.
That project is in the district of Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, also defied Trump and earned the White House’s ire by supporting a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill compelling the Justice Department’s full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
