MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Yesterday, more than 11 months after being inaugurated, President Trump vetoed his first bills of this term. Both had passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. These were not divisive bills. So these vetoes pit the president against his fellow Republicans and raise the question of how far they might go to defy the president. NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben is here to walk us through details. Hey there.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey there.
KELLY: What did he veto?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, the first is a bill that would have helped communities in southeastern Colorado pay for a conduit that would carry clean water. The bill would have done that by giving them more time to repay money without interest to the federal government. Now, that conduit is important because residents there have dealt with unsafe water. Some of the groundwater is tainted with toxic elements like radium. The other bill deals with Florida. It would have expanded the area reserved for the Miccosukee Tribe and required the secretary of the interior to help safeguard communities there from flooding.
KELLY: OK. Let me take these one by one. The Colorado one, first, and this clean water conduit. Why did President Trump veto it?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, his stated reason is that the bill would force federal taxpayers to foot the bill for a local water project that, as initially envisioned, would have been paid for by the local communities. He added in a statement that he's committed to ending, quote, "the massive cost of taxpayer handouts." But it's important to get a sense of the scope here. Federal funding has paid for a large chunk of this project, but as our colleagues at Colorado Public Radio have pointed out, this particular bill would cost the federal government less than $500,000, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, which, in terms of federal spending, is absolutely tiny.
KELLY: May I ask about the language you just used? You just told us the president's stated reason for vetoing this. Is there a reason to think there are other motives in play?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert has raised this possibility. In a statement, she said, quote, "I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation." She clashed with the president this year by pushing for the release of the Epstein files, but Trump has not explicitly linked that to his veto.
But in addition, Trump, earlier this year, threatened what he called harsh measures if a woman named Tina Peters was not released from a Colorado prison. Peters was a county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, and she is serving a nine-year sentence for helping someone get access to voting equipment after the 2020 election. So the whole case is tied to conspiracy theories about election fraud. Earlier this month, Trump said he was pardoning Peters, but presidential pardons apply to federal crimes. Peters was convicted at the state level, so she remains in prison. Now, again, Trump has not explicitly linked Peters to this veto, but this morning, he posted on social media that he wants Peters freed, so we know she's on his mind.
KELLY: OK. Go to the other one, the Florida veto. What are the reasons, stated or otherwise, for that veto?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, Trump was straightforward in saying this veto was in part about politics. He said in a statement that the Miccosukee Tribe, quote, "has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies." Now, that seems to refer to the tribe earlier this year joining a lawsuit against an immigration detention center the Trump administration created in Florida, the one the president calls Alligator Alcatraz. The tribe considers the land it's built on sacred.
KELLY: To circle back to something I said at the outset, that both these bills, Florida and Colorado, they passed with the support of the president's GOP colleagues in Congress, right?
KURTZLEBEN: Yes. In fact, they both passed the House and Senate without those person-by-person roll call votes. The bills just had so much support. They were able to pass via voice votes or unanimous consent. So now the question is whether Congress can or wants to override Trump's vetoes.
KELLY: That's NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben. Thank you, Danielle.
KURTZLEBEN: Thank you.
KELLY: And Happy New Year.
KURTZLEBEN: You too. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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