GOP blocks Democrats’ bid for $2K payments Trump demanded

House Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to meet President Donald Trump’s demand to pay most Americans $2,000 to help weather the coronavirus pandemic.

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.

CORONAVIRUS IMPACT: ADDITIONAL COVERAGE
Bryce Doty, Senior VP and Senior Portfolio Manager, Sit Fixed Income Advisors

Bryce Doty is senior vice president and senior portfolio manager at Sit Fixed Income.

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Dave Russell is vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. He is responsible for driving strategic product and go-to-market programs, spearheading industry engagement and evangelizing Veeam’s vision for the Hyper-Available Enterprise, and works closely with the executive leadership team in accelerating the company’s growth in the enterprise. Most recently he held the role of vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner with a focus on storage strategies and technologies

Alin Srivastava is a vice president at Critical Start, a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions. He is a veteran of the security industry with more than two decades of experience leading enterprise hardware, software, and services organizations.

“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.

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A runner stands near the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg

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.