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.
Arianna Campbell is a shareholder and consultant at Boomer Consulting Inc.
William Holder serves as dean of the USC Leventhal School of Accounting, and holds the Alan Casden Dean’s Chair of Accountancy. Prior to his current post, he was the Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting and director of the SEC and Financial Reporting Institute in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Dean Holder has published extensively on the subjects of financial accounting and reporting and auditing. He has received numerous awards during his career, including being twice named as one of the “Top 100 People” in the accounting profession and receiving the AICPA Gold Medal for Distinguished Service, the highest honor awarded by that organization. He has served on a number of governance and standard setting authorities including the Accounting Standards Executive Committee of the AICPA and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. During congressional hearings leading to passage of the Sarbanes/Oxley Act, he provided invited testimony about financial reporting, auditing and corporate governance.
Udi Hoitash is an accounting professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
“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.