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.
Neal Pandozzi is a partner with the law firm Bowditch & Dewey, LLP in Boston, Massachusetts. He has over two decades of public finance experience. He is licensed to practice law in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Aaron J. Harding is Head of Financial Wellness for Morgan Stanley at Work. In this role, he is responsible for developing and implementing human and tech-powered financial coaching capabilities to support and improve the financial well-being of participants across the Morgan Stanley At Work ecosystem.
Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Aaron led PwC's Financial Education and Wellness team, providing strategic leadership for the design, development, and delivery of employee-focused financial well-being programs, including the assessments, digital tools and thought leadership to support them.
Aaron earned his MBA cum laude from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College where he was an Olin Fellow, and a B.A. Cum Laude in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Nischal Nadhamuni is the CTO and co-founder of Klarity. Prior to Klarity, he worked on AI applications at Airware, Flipkart and Mass General Hospital. His team's work at MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital) to detect cancer causing genes using machine learning was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
“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.