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.
Marilyn Schlein Kramer is senior vice president of customer experience at HDMS, an analytics platform company. You can reach her at mkramer@hdms.com.
John Samuel, who joined CGS as its global chief information officer in 2016, was promoted to executive vice president in 2018, leading the company’s digital transformation to support its future expansion plans. With more than 20 years of progressive technology operations experience, he leads the global CGS technology teams, responsible for shaping the corporate digital strategy and overseeing IT initiatives, cybersecurity and implementation of productivity and process improvement tools.
Robert Dumas is the founder and CEO of TaxConnex, which provides outsourced sales tax services. An accountant, consultant and entrepreneur, he began his public accounting career on the tax staff at Arthur Young & Co., followed by a brief stint at Grant Thornton. In 1998, he founded Tax Partners, which became the largest sales tax compliance service bureau in the country, and later sold it to Thomson Corporation. He founded TaxConnex in 2006 on the principle that the sales tax industry needed more than automation to truly help clients, thus building within TaxConnex a proprietary platform and network of sales tax experts to take sales tax off client’s plates.
“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.