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.
Robert Smithson is the founder and CEO of Just Insure, a pay-per-mile insurance technology company that uses telematics to set prices, rewarding safe drivers and reducing bias. A successful entrepreneur, Robert also founded PythonAnywhere, a leading Python platform-as-a-service, and Genius Sports Group, which was sold for $280 million in 2018.
Prior to his entrepreneurship, Robert held several fund management positions including investment director at GAM, a pure-play asset management group headquartered in Zurich. He was also a partner at both THS Partners and Arete Research in the United Kingdom.
Robert graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in philosophy and currently resides in Los Angeles, California where Just Insure is headquartered.
Anneliese Lederer is director of fair lending at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.
SaVion Harris joined Intercontinental Wealth Advisors as a financial advisor in the summer of 2021 after graduating from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance. During his time at UTSA, he was a student-athlete as a member of the football team and had dreams of playing in the NFL. He currently helps manage client assets, working to truly understand clients’ situations, goals, and dreams — helping them envision their future and then take the steps to make it a reality. He has attained his Texas Life Insurance license as well as his Series 65 Uniform Investment Adviser Law license.
“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.