The Senate overwhelmingly approved a defense bill on Thursday that included Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) provision requiring the military to rename U.S. bases named after Confederate generals.
The bill passed by a vote of 86-14, a veto-proof majority that would override President Donald Trump’s effort to kill the measure, which he had threatened to do at the end of June after Warren announced her proposal.
“I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill if the Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (of all people!) Amendment, which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars, is in the Bill!” he tweeted at the time.
Warren slammed Trump’s hostile response on the Senate floor shortly afterward, declaring that the President had “chosen a well-worn path of hatred and division.”
“The Confederate soldiers who betrayed the United States to fight for the Confederacy were fighting for the institution of slavery. Plain. Simple. Ugly,” the Democratic senator said. “It is time to put the names of those leaders who fought and killed U.S. soldiers in defense of a perverted version of America where they belong, as footnotes in our history books, not plastered on our nation’s most significant military installations.”
There are currently ten Army bases named after Confederate generals.
