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.
Anant Jhingran is chief technology officer, Apigee, at Google Cloud. He was previously an engineer, VP and CTO for IBM's information management division. He has also been the director of computer science at the IBM Almaden Research Center and senior manager for e-commerce and data management at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center.
Jerry Melnick is president and chief executive officer at SIOS Technology, where he is responsible for directing the overall corporate strategy and leading the company’s ongoing growth and expansion. Jerry has over 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software markets, including as CTO at Marathon Technologies, along with executive positions at PPGx, Belmont Research and Digital Equipment Corporation. Jerry holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Beloit College with graduate work in computer rngineering and computer science at Boston University.
Michael Endler is head of editorial for Apigee at Google Cloud.
“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.