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.
Sathyanarayanan (Sathya) Sethuraman is the director of UiPath’s global insurance and financial services practice. With more than 20 years’ experience, Sathya has become a trusted advisor to Fortune 100 global insurance and financial services enterprises and has led large-scale digital transformation initiatives. At UiPath, Sathya is responsible for building industry solutions for intelligent process automation leveraging UiPath’s platform and the UiPath alliance ecosystem.
Michael Sellai is a partner in BPM’s Managed IT Services practice, where he helps clients manage, maintain and upgrade their information technology systems. In his nearly 20 years of IT experience, he has among other notable projects helped clients with as many as 300 employees automate the onboarding of employee computers and application delivery.
Jill Pappenheimer is a partner in the HR Consulting practice at BPM, a West Coast-based accountant and advisory firm that ranks among the 50 largest in the United States. She brings 30 years of experience supporting the people function for organizations ranging from large financial institutions to small entrepreneurial teams.
“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.