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
Headshot of Anne E. Weilepp, MD.
Anne E. Weilepp, MD

Dr. John Alchemy, MD, QME, and Dr. Anne E. Weilepp, MD, are a husband-and-wife medical team and founders of RateFast, a workers' compensation predictive data company in Northern California. Both are specialty boarded and trained at UC San Diego. They hold seven total patents, with more patents pending, in data analytics and impairment rating, including the development of the Variable Thread Analytic Computation (VTAC) model for multilayered logic calculations.

Javier de la Torre is Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CARTO. One of the pioneers of location intelligence, Javier founded the company in 2012 with a vision to democratize data analysis and visualization. Under his leadership, CARTO has grown from a groundbreaking idea into one of the fastest-growing geospatial companies in the world.

CARTO empowers organizations to harness the power of spatial data for everything from network planning to portfolio risk management. As a truly cloud-native geospatial platform, CARTO ensures all data processing and visualization occur within your existing cloud data warehouse, boosting both security and performance.

Javier started his career as a conservation scientist, applying data-sharing technologies to analyze and visualize endangered species. In 2007, he founded Vizzuality, a renowned geospatial company dedicated to bridging the gap between science and policymaking by the better use of data.

Chason Forehand is the founder of HR-4U Inc.

“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.