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.
Peter Rasmussen, MD, is Chief Clinical Officer, The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic, and Professor of Neurosurgery, Department of Neurosurgery, Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Rasmussen received his bachelor of science in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1987. He earned his medical degree from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in 1991. Dr. Rasmussen is a past-President of the Society of Neurointerventional Surgery where he played a leading role on the national stage in continuing society initiatives to resource, train and support veteran and new practitioners in an area of medicine that is transforming treatment approaches to neurovascular conditions.
Christoph Dankert is the senior vice president of Provider Partnerships at Carrum Health.
Scott Madenburg is a market advisor at AuditBoard, where he works with various internal audit and compliance teams to help automate the administrative tasks of audit, risk and compliance activities. He is an internal audit leader with over 15 years of global business experience in financial, information system, operational, and compliance auditing; Sarbanes-Oxley; business process evaluation and design; ERP system implementation and administration; mergers and acquisitions; cyber-security; and fraud investigation. He began his career at Arthur Andersen before transitioning into internal audit with Fox Entertainment & News Corporation and Gemstar-TV Guide/Rovi Corporation. Prior to joining AuditBoard, he was the head of audit at Mobilitie LLC, where he built the internal audit function from the ground up to an eight-person department focusing on agile audits, cyber and IT security, and FCC compliance.
“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.