The Senate is set to vote this week on whether to override President Donald Trump’s recent veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual spending bill that funds the military. Trump had vetoed the NDAA in late December because he said he didn’t like that it called for renaming military bases that honored Confederate officials and because the bill didn’t include a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social-media companies and other tech companies from liability for content published by others using their technology. But boundless defense spending is one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans still agree on, and the Senate is widely expected to overturn Trump’s veto of the NDAA.
This is where Sanders comes in. He says he plans to filibuster the override vote for as long as he can in order to make Majority Leader Mitch McConnell call a vote on those $2,000 Covid relief checks. “McConnell and the Senate want to expedite the override vote and I understand that,” Sanders told Politico. “But I’m not going to allow that to happen unless there is a vote, no matter how long that takes, on the $2,000 direct payment.”
The lower, $600 direct relief checks included in the most recent coronavirus pandemic relief bill were the result of months of negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Majority Leader McConnell, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. But after Congress passed that compromise relief bill, President Trump called it a “disgrace” and threatened to veto it. He specifically singled out the $600 stimulus checks as “ridiculously low.”