US Senate voted on Friday to override President Donald Trump's veto of the sweeping defense bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, delivering a bipartisan rebuke to the President in his final days in office.

Iran PressAmerica: Meeting in a rare New Year's Day session, the US Senate secured the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto with bipartisan support two days before a new Congress will be sworn in on Sunday. Eight previous vetoes have been upheld.

This is while the US Republican lawmakers have largely stood by the president during his turbulent White House term.

Since losing his re-election bid in November, however, Trump has lashed out at them for not fully backing his unsupported claims of voting fraud, rejecting his demand for bigger COVID-19 relief checks, and for moving toward the veto override.

The Republican-led Senate, following the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on Monday, passed the measure without his support, voting 81-13.

A US president has the power to veto a bill passed by Congress, but lawmakers can uphold the bill if two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and Senate vote to override it.

The $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) determines everything from how many ships are bought to soldiers' pay and how to address geopolitical threats, but Trump refused to sign it into law because it did not repeal certain legal protections for social media platforms and did include a provision stripping the names of Confederate generals from military bases.

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