The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday declined to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a bill intended to help complete a pipeline to carry clean water to communities in southeastern Colorado
The vote was 248 in favor of overriding the veto and 177 opposed. It needed the support of two-thirds of those voting to pass.
Thirty-five Republicans joined all of the voting Democrats in supporting the override, but it wasn’t enough.
The Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act passed Congress unanimously last year. It would shift more of the cost of completing the Arkansas Valley Conduit onto the federal government and away from the communities in southeastern Colorado, many of them poor, it aims to serve.
The conduit, first approved in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, is a 130-mile pipeline that is supposed to span Lake Pueblo to the Lamar area and carry clean water for municipal and industrial uses. The communities the pipeline aims to serve struggle to provide water to residents and businesses because of naturally occurring salinity or radionuclide contamination in their groundwater.
The counties served by the conduit — Pueblo, Otero, Crowley, Kiowa, Bent and Prowers — all voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024.
In vetoing the bill, Trump complained about shifting the cost burden onto the federal taxpayer.
“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 in a letter explaining his decision.
But the decision also came as Trump is intensifying his reprisals against Colorado over the state’s refusal to release Tina Peters from prison.
Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, is serving a nine-year state prison sentence for orchestrating a breach of her county’s election system as part of a failed attempt to uncover voter fraud. The president vowed to punish Colorado as long as Peters remains in prison — and he appears to be making good on that promise.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican who was the main sponsor of the legislation, and whose district would benefit most from it, has been highly critical of the veto.
“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,” Boebert said of the president when the veto was announced.
Boebert, normally a Trump ally, spoke on the House floor Thursday to implore her colleagues to override the veto.
“This is a piece of legislation that has gone through committee, has been negotiated, has been debated, has gone back and forth between both chambers — and we were able to pass this single-subject legislation all the way through with unanimous support in this body and in the Senate,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction Republican whose district would also benefit from the bill, said the override was a test of whether the federal government was willing to honor its commitments.
“These are real families, real towns and real public health consequences,” he said. “Rural Colorado and rural America, more broadly, voted overwhelmingly for this president and for an agenda that promised they would not be forgotten. They expected Washington to keep its word, not abandon them midway.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Lafayette, joined his Republican colleagues from Colorado in asking that the House override the veto.
“As you consider where you land on this particular vote, let me be abundantly clear: it does not matter if your community supported Donald Trump politically if we don’t take this step,” he said. “Trust me — no town is safe, no county is safe, no state is safe from political retaliation by the administration. We will be back here on the floor debating a veto for a project in Arkansas or in Texas or in Ohio.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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