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.
Andrew Hoag is CEO and founder of Teampay, a leading distributed spend management platform. He has founded four companies, including urbantag in 2011, which tackled the trillion-dollar online-to-offline commerce market and exited in October 2012. In addition to these entrepreneurial and leadership roles, he has served as an angel investor and advisor to many other companies, helping them to raise venture capital and design product strategy. Prior to that, he held management roles in customer engineering, product management, internationalization, business development and marketing at VeriSign, and, before that, he connected and built supercomputers for NASA.
From stimulus checks to the Paycheck Protection Program, the government’s infusion of cash into an economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic has primarily helped those who already strong banking relationships.
Jason Schow is a product manager at the tax practice management software company Canopy. Jason Blumer is the founder of Thriveal and the chief innovative officer of his CPA firm, Blumer & Associates.
“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.