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.
Omar Hamidi is a consultant for 2BM, a leading IT consultancy based in Denmark.
Russell Berger is vice president of IT and network services at InTouch Health, and was instrumental in securing the vendor’s HITRUST CSF Certified designation in December 2017.
Johannes-Tobias Lorenz leads McKinsey’s work in digital insurance in Europe, helping insurers build their digital strategies, expand and serve direct markets, and strengthen their customer-service experience.
He also oversees the firm’s global customer experience for financial-services activities, helping financial institutions around the world transform the ways they meet the needs of increasingly demanding customers.
Some of his recent client work includes building a digital strategy for a leading global insurer and helping launch direct insurance players in Germany and other European markets. He also assists clients across Europe in areas such as social-media strategy and digital enablement of the tied-agents channel. Other projects include working with a number of insurers to digitize their customer journey for processes such as claims, life-insurance onboarding, and auto-insurance sales.
Furthermore, Lorenz helps private-equity firms on due diligences and portfolio work.
Lorenz has coauthored several McKinsey articles about issues confronting the insurance industry, such as insurance fraud and digital transformation.
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.