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.
Steven B. Goldman is a senior lecturer at MIT and director of the Crisis Management & Business Resiliency and Advanced Business Resiliency courses. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Harvard University, where he lectures on Crisis and Risk Communications, and directs the Radiological Emergency Management program.
Sandra Galletti is the assistant director of MIT's Crisis Management & Business Resiliency and Advanced Business Resiliency courses. She also serves as head of operations and resilience at Tidona Comunicazione in Milan, Italy.
Alexandra Mousavizadeh is the co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, an AI benchmarking intelligence platform that specializes in ranking companies on their AI adoption progress. She has 20 years experience in building indexes for nations and companies on economic and technological issues. Prior to Evident, Mousavizadeh led Tortoise Media's intelligence business, where she developed the Global AI Index. Previously, she was director of The Prosperity Index for the Legatum Institute (now the Prosperity Institute). Mousavizadeh's earlier roles include CEO of ARC Rating, senior sovereign analyst for Moody's and head of country risk management at Morgan Stanley.
“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.