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.
Patrick Bermingham is CEO of Adflex.
With Forrester since July 2005, Diego primarily contributes to and advises on Forrester's offerings for Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He partners with Forrester's global application leaders and is a leading expert on SDLC processes and practices, covering topics such as Agile development, Agile and Lean transformations, Agile development sourcing strategies and services, Agile testing practices and tools, DevOps, and software testing and quality, with a key focus on systems of engagement. Diego also covers software delivery metrics, artificial intelligence, and open source governance.
His 28 years of industry experience, in addition to application development, allow him to give expert advice on change management programs for optimizing the overall modern application delivery process, execute technology management assessments, review technology management strategies, and make comparisons. He also has experience in complex mission-critical project and client engagement management.
Previous Work Experience
Prior to joining Forrester, Diego held international management positions covering various roles, such as director consultant at Meta Group and head of Agile product development for advanced reuse methods and technologies at Quartersoft. He was also regional VP and director for consulting at Genesis/Iona, where he helped many clients transition to distributed applications. He also worked as an enterprise architect and project/product manager, participating in various pan-European projects. He started out as a software engineer, developing AI tools and early graphical user interface technologies at Olivetti.
Diego has also been very active in global open software standards consortia such as OMG, contributing to the early specifications of middleware standards such as CORBA and model-driven architecture. He has been a frequent speaker and panelist at many European conferences on software development.
Diego has published various research reports on open source, software reuse, semantic Web, and object technology, including the AI book Practical Experience in Building Expert Systems.
Education
Diego received a master's degree in computer science from Pisa University in Italy, and he specialized in artificial intelligence through on-site courses at Stanford University and SRI Palo Alto during a two-year working internship with Olivetti in the US.
David Flower is chief executive officer at VoltDB.
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.