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.
Kathy Davis, CPA, is a manager in the Tax Advisory Services Department of Anglin Reichmann Armstrong.
She has more than a decade of experience in public accounting, and her focus is retirement planning, estate and gift planning and preparation of complex tax returns. Contact her at kdavis@anglincpa.com.
Vara Kumar is the co-founder and head of R&D at Whatfix. Vara co-founded Whatfix with Khadim Batti in 2014 with the vision of empowering individuals and organizations to work symbiotically with technology to maximize their potential. Based in the US, Vara leads the company's strategy and vision for product development and adoptions, technology development, and innovation – helping accelerate successful integrations for partners and customers. He is passionate about building technology that users love.
Thomas Horan is an associate at Seyfarth Shaw LLP where he advises and defends employers in numerous industries on a range of employment and labor law matters in class actions and individual-plaintiff actions.
“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.
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.