Trump vetoes first bills of second term

President Trump vetoed the first two bills of his administration just days before his first year back in office came to an end.

The White House said Tuesday that he vetoed two bills that got to his desk this week — the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act and the Miccosukee Reserved Area Amendments Act.

The bill for the Arkansas Valley would finish a 130-mile pipeline bringing drinking water to 39 Colorado communities. It would help the towns pay for the project by removing interest payments and extending the repayment period to 100 years.

The pipeline was first proposed during the Kennedy administration in 1962 but was never built because the communities could not afford 100% of the costs. A law signed by then-President Obama in 2009 made it so a percentage of funding was covered by the federal government.

The president said in a statement, “H.R. 131 would continue the failed policies of the past by forcing Federal taxpayers to bear even more of the massive costs of a local water project — a local water project that, as initially conceived, was supposed to be paid for by the localities using it.

“Enough is enough. My administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies. Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation,” he said.

The bill has bipartisan support and was backed by Rep. Lauren Boebert, Colorado Republican and supporter of Mr. Trump.

“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” Ms. Boebert said in a statement to Denver’s KUSA.

She said she hopes “this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics.”

Ms. Boebert was one of the few GOP lawmakers to side with Democrats to call for the release of the documents about deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On X she wrote, “This isn’t over.”

Colorado Democrats were angry over the veto as well. Sen. John Hickenlooper said the president was playing “partisan games and punishing Colorado by making rural communities suffer without clean drinking water.”

“This was a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate and House UNANIMOUSLY,” he wrote on X. “Congress should swiftly overturn this veto.”

The Miccosukee Reserved Area Amendments Act would add a part of Florida’s Everglades National Park, called the Osceola Camp, to the Miccosukee Reserved Area, with the Interior Department needing to protect it from flooding.

It also had bipartisan support in the House and Senate.

Mr. Trump accused the Miccosukee American Indian tribe of not following his immigration policies, including challenging his administration’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center.

“But despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected,” he wrote.

He argued that the Osceola Camp was originally created “without authorization” and “it is not the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay to fix problems in an area that the Tribe has never been authorized to occupy.”

He added, “My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country.”

The president vetoed 10 bills during his first term, but it’s rare for a president to veto bills when his party has control of Congress.

To override the vetoes, both chambers of Congress would have to pass the bills again by a two-thirds margin.