House Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to meet President Donald Trump’s demand to pay most Americans $2,000 to help weather the coronavirus pandemic.
Republicans objected to the bill House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer sought to pass by unanimous consent Thursday to replace the $600 payments in the latest pandemic relief legislation with the $2,000 payments.
Barrett Burns is president and chief executive officer of VantageScore Solutions LLC, an independently managed joint venture of the three national credit reporting companies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and the company behind the VantageScore consumer credit scoring model. He is a 2011 member of the Federal Reserve Board�s Consumer Advisory Council and a director of the Homeownership Preservation Foundation.
Sushil Prabhu is CEO of OpenCrowd.
As executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Abby Kearns leads the ecosystem of developers, users and applications running on Cloud Foundry, and works closely with the board to drive the Foundation’s vision and grow the open source project. Prior to Cloud Foundry Foundation, Abby focused on Pivotal Cloud Foundry as part of the product management team at Pivotal. She spent eight years at Verizon where she led product management and product marketing teams dedicated to the early days of cloud services. In her free time, Abby enjoys indulging in food and wine, and spending time with her husband and son.
“House and Senate Democrats have repeatedly fought for bigger checks for the American people, which House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected — first, during our negotiations when they said that they would not go above $600 and now, with this act of callousness on the Floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.
Democrats will try again with a roll call vote on a new bill Dec. 28, when the House also plans a vote to override Trump’s veto on the National Defense Authorization Act. Since current government spending runs out that day — and funds for the rest of the fiscal year are included in the virus relief bill Trump criticized and hasn’t signed -- the House could also pass another stopgap measure to avert a partial government shutdown.
Republicans on Thursday tried to seek unanimous consent on a measure to examine taxpayer money spent on foreign aid, but Democrats blocked that move. In his complaint Tuesday about Congress’s combined virus aid and government spending bill, Trump criticized federal resources spent on international programs, even though that spending was allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process.