LOS ANGELES—Earlier this month, Donald Trump said he would veto the essential National Defense Authorization Act — a bill that funds servicemember salaries, health care, and almost every other function that keeps the United States military operational — unless the bill included a provision repealing Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, often described as “the First Amendment of the Internet.”
On Wednesday, Trump made good on his assertion, vetoing the bill, and effectively cancelling planned bonuses in the paychecks of U.S. troops. The $740 billion NDAA also included increases in “hazard pay” for soldiers who take especially dangerous assignments overseas. Those pay raises are also now cancelled, unless Congress can override the presidential veto.
Section 230 is the law that protects internet platforms from legal liability for user content, enabling a wide range of controversial expression — including, of course, adult content — to appear online without threat of censorship. But in a statement announcing the veto, Trump called the 24-year-old law a “very dangerous national security risk” that makes U.S. intelligence operations “impossible to conduct without everyone knowing what we are doing at every step.”
To override the veto would require a two-thirds vote in both the house and Senate — in other words, 67 votes in the Senate, 292 votes in the House. As of Wednesday afternoon, one Republican Senator, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, said that he would not vote to override the veto unless a Section 230 repeal clause was added.
Another Republican, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, said that while he supported changes to Section 230, he would nonetheless vote to override Trump’s veto.
The veto comes after Trump signed an executive order in May instructing the Federal Communications Commission to “review” Section 230, with an eye toward narrowing the free online speech protections it offers. The executive order quickly faced a pair of lawsuits — by the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the voting rights group Rock the Vote — claiming that the order itself was unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
But in each lawsuit, a court has ruled that the order itself does not violate the Constitution, and that any lawsuits should wait until the government actually takes specific actions that could threaten First Amendment protections.
Photo By The White House / Wikimedia Commons
