Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday closed off chances that the Senate would pass anytime soon a House bill that would give most Americans $2,000 stimulus payments.
The Kentucky Republican said the House legislation, approved in a bipartisan vote Monday, “has no realistic path” to quick passage in the Senate and that it falls short of the demands of President Donald Trump. He again blocked an attempt by Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to adopt the House bill to increase the payments to $2,000 from the $600 by unanimous consent.
Scott Friesen is CEO of Newport Credentialing Solutions.
Pete Potsos is a CPA with over 24 years of experience in the accounting profession. In his current role as a strategic account manager and client accounting services strategic advisor for Bill.com, he is bringing his experience of working with firms launching cloud-based client accounting services practices in various stages of their life cycle as well as firm size to the Bill.com Accountant Partners. His focus is currently on working with some of Bill.com’s most strategic accountant partners, as well as continue to evangelize the use of Bill.com as an essential component of a firm’s accounting technology ecosystem.
He began his career as a tax and audit professional at the Detroit office of PwC, in addition to running his own practice. For the past 16 years, he has helped nearly a thousand firms with the evaluation, selection and onboarding of tax and accounting software to aid in the improvement of the firm’s workflow and profitability. The past five years, he has helped firms to achieve their goals of working smarter and driving new revenue growth for their firms through Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services.
He lives and works in Dexter, Michigan with his wife Valerie and their three children. Their oldest is in his second year at the University of Nottingham, England and their youngest is a 2 year old baby girl. He is an active member of his community, having served on several non-profit boards, association committees and the Scoutmaster of a very active Boy Scout Troop in Dexter.
Dr. Nir Kossovsky, CEO of Steel City Re, is an authority on business process risk and reputational value. He has been an industry-wide leader in the development of indexed measures of reputational value and actuarily sound underwriting methods that deter reputational attacks, and protect companies and their leadership. He holds more than a dozen patents, including an algorithmic reputational value measurement system currently enabling insurance solutions, third party investment strategies and governance products. He has written hundreds of articles and four books, including “Reputation, Stock Price and You,” Apress 2012). He has degrees in philosophy, business, and medicine, served as a Captain in the US Navy Reserves, and early in his career was a tenured faculty member at UCLA.
The Senate instead will work on combining the stimulus payments with measures on election integrity and rolling back social media liability protections, he said. That responds to all three issues Trump has said he wants, but a bill combining them likely will alienate enough senators in both parties to leave prospects for bigger stimulus payments dead in the Senate.
“The Senate is not going to be bullied into rushing out more borrowed money into the hands of the Democrats’ rich friends who don’t need the help,” McConnell said. The House bill would raise the income cutoff to receive a payment.
The clash over the payments also is entangling another piece of year-end business in the Senate — a vote to override Trump’s veto of a crucial $740.5 billion defense policy bill. Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey said they will continue to delay the defense legislation vote unless McConnell relents and allows a vote on a standalone bill on the bigger stimulus checks.
“We are saying to Mitch McConnell, to allow the United States Senate to do what it’s supposed to do, and that is the vote,” Sanders told reporters. “The House passed the bill, it’s over here right now. Do you want to vote against it? Then vote against it.”
Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey later blocked an attempt by Sanders to call up the House bill for a roll call vote.