The Senate resoundingly voted to overturn President Donald Trump’s wholly fabricated National Emergency declaration on Thursday, with 12 Republicans joining Democrats for a final vote of 59 to 41.
Thursday’s vote comes after days of pathetic last-minute scrambling by the White House to prevent a wholesale Republican revolt against the president, who has vowed to veto any effort to block his unilateral plans to finance his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Wednesday evening, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Ben Sasse interrupted the president’s family dinner to beg Trump to compromise with Congress and avoid the exact scenario which played out today. According to the Washington Post, Trump dismissed their concerns entirely.
As Thursday’s vote neared, a growing chorus of Republicans publicly came out against the president, largely on the grounds that it subverted the authority of Congress. Among them was freshman Sen. Mitt Romney, who said that Trump’s emergency declaration is “both inconsistent with my beliefs and contrary to my oath to defend the Constitution.”
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, despite having just three weeks earlier written a lengthy opinion piece explaining just why he’d be voting in favor of the resolution against the emergency, announced on the Senate floor just before the vote that he would, in fact, back Trump and oppose the resolution.
The president, meanwhile, spent much of the morning before the vote defending his national emergency on Twitter, and warning Republicans who vote against it that they would be siding with “Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!”
The Democratic-controlled House previously passed its version of the resolution overturning Trump’s declaration with 13 Republicans defecting to join the entire Democratic caucus. In spite of the resolution passing both chambers of Congress, Trump insisted again on Thursday that “we’ll probably have to veto” the resolution. It would be the first veto Trump has issued.
In order to override the president’s veto, the resolution would need votes from two-thirds of both chambers, or 290 votes in the House and 67 Senate votes, meaning over 40 more Republicans in the House and at least eight more Republicans in the Senate will have to join on in order to override the president’s veto.
So far, there have been over 2,500 vetoes in the history of the United States, and only 111 vetoes overridden. We’ll see if this becomes the 112th.