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For the first time since President Obama took office in 2009, Congress has overridden his veto.
The U.S. Senate voted 97-1 to override President Obama's veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia. The lone dissenting vote was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who has "always had the president's back":
In a letter Monday to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.) and ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter warned that allowing the bill to become law risked "damaging our close and effective cooperation with other countries" and "could ultimately have a chilling effect on our own counter-terrorism efforts." Thornberry and Smith both circulated letters among members in the last few days, urging them to vote against overriding the veto. CIA Director John O. Brennan also warned of the 9/11 bill's "grave implications for the national security of the United States" in a statement Wednesday.
The House of Representatives voted 348-to-77:
Congress on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to override a veto by President Obama for the first time, passing into law a bill that would allow the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the plot.
Democrats in large numbers joined with Republicans to deliver a remarkable rebuke to the president. The 97-to-1 vote in the Senate and the 348-to-77 vote in the House displayed the enduring power of the Sept. 11 families in Washington and the diminishing influence here of the Saudi government.
See also: The Risks of Suing the Saudis for 9/11 by the New York Times Editorial Board and this article in the Saudi Gazette.
Previously: President Obama to Veto Bill Allowing September 11 Victims to Sue Saudi Arabia
(Score: 3, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:49PM
They want the Palestinians to peacefully submit to being ethnically cleansed, that's what the Israelis want. But even now with pushback from the Whitehouse on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem still builds more there. Personally, I think the real mistake the Israelis made was to choose the US as their patron instead of the USSR. They could have accomplished complete eradication of the Palestinians in a handful of years without having to worry about namby-pamby American public opinion. As it is they've had to go to enormous trouble to subvert DC and said American public opinion over years, and go mega-slow-mo with the eradication campaign. Russians, on the other hand, don't give a crap about such niceties.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by julian on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:00PM
In 1990 the population of Gaza and the West Bank was 2M. Today it's 4.3M.
It's a strange sort of genocide that sees the target population more than double in a generation.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:53PM
I think the real mistake the Israelis made was to choose the US as their patron instead of the USSR. They could have accomplished complete eradication of the Palestinians in a handful of years without having to worry about namby-pamby American public opinion.
That would have been quite unlikely, given the history between the USSR and the Jews, and most of that was Stalin's doing [wikipedia.org]. As such, I suspect that BenGurion, Begin and the others were deeply suspicious of Stalin and would not have sought to ally themselves with the USSR.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @12:43AM