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.
Tom Brehmer is a co-founder and CEO of Trisk.io Inc., a no-code automation platform spun out of VPTax Inc., a Silicon Valley corporate tax firm he founded in 1991, where he specialized in multistate and multinational technology companies. Prior to VPTax, he was a tax partner at KPMG. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he has been an evangelist of automation as a means of achieving superior client service and improved work-life balance. In addition to being published in technical tax publications, he was featured in Upside magazine for his innovative business model.
Diana Li is a spring reporting associate for Financial Planning. She's a master's candidate at New York University and has experience in Beijing bureaus of The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Financial Times and Xinhua News.
She's on Twitter @diana_k16.
“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.