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.
As U.S. chief operating officer at Esker, Steven Smith is responsible for all operations in North, South and Central America. He joined Esker in 2003 as the director of sales. Prior to Esker, He spent 17 years at Equitrac Corporation as the senior vice president of worldwide sales and two years in sales at Pitney Bowes.
Mia Barnes is a health and wellness freelance writer with over 3+ years of experience specializing in workplace wellness. Mia is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Body+Mind Magazine, an online healthy living publication. Follow Mia and Body+Mind on Twitter!
Dasle Hong is the Senior Manager of Employer Brand & Internal Communications at DailyPay. She is an innovative digital strategist with 10+ years of expertise in social media, employee engagement, and internal/executive communications. Dasle is passionate about cultivating connections between employees and a company through corporate philanthropy, employer branding campaigns, and authentic storytelling. Dasle is also a published author in the Oxford University Press textbook: Digital Strategies: Data-Driven Public Relations, Marketing, and Advertising.
“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.