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.
Barry Wides is the deputy comptroller for community affairs at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where he oversees outreach to banks and their community partners, the development of related policy and the production of educational materials on community development.
Carey Anne Nadeau is a MIT-trained entrepreneur, focused on modernizing the measurement of risk. Formerly a researcher at the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, Carey Anne went on to found ODN (ODNsure.com), which uses location-based driving data and open data to predict where car crashes are likely and help auto insurance carriers and city Vision Zero Initiatives prevent crashes and save lives. She is the host of Profiles in Risk, a podcast featuring influential drivers of transformation in the insurance industry.
Rani Hoitash is the John E. Rhodes Professor of Accountancy at Bentley University. He received his Ph.D. in accounting and information systems from Rutgers University and a Bachelor of Science in Economics at the College of Management in Tel-Aviv Israel. His research concentrates on corporate governance, internal controls and auditing. His work is published in The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting & Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, Sloan Management Review, and several other journals. Professor Hoitash’s teaching interests include financial accounting, accounting information systems, and auditing. Hoitash recently served as an editor of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory and on the editorial boards of Contemporary Accounting Research and the Journal of Business Research. He is a member of the Information Systems Audit and Controls Association and the American Accounting Association and is a Certified Information System Auditor (CISA).
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.