Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday closed off chances that the Senate would pass anytime soon a House bill that would give most Americans $2,000 stimulus payments.
The Kentucky Republican said the House legislation, approved in a bipartisan vote Monday, “has no realistic path” to quick passage in the Senate and that it falls short of the demands of President Donald Trump. He again blocked an attempt by Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to adopt the House bill to increase the payments to $2,000 from the $600 by unanimous consent.
Noah Gold is the general counsel and head of public policy of Prism Data, a cash flow underwriting infrastructure and analytics platform. Prior to joining Prism, he was the general counsel of Petal, a fintech credit card company. Before that, he was the assistant general counsel of a leading e-commerce software platform, and prior to that Noah previously practiced law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.
Jason Rosen is founder and CEO of Prism Data, a cash flow underwriting infrastructure and analytics platform. Prior to founding Prism, Jason was co-founder and CEO of Petal, a fintech credit card company. Jason served on the Consumer Advisory Board of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sat on the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act panel for the Open Banking rulemaking, and is a member of the OCC's Project REACh. Jason previously practiced law at Sullivan & Cromwell and Gunderson Dettmer, where he represented financial institutions, technology companies and venture capitalists. Jason holds a JD from Harvard Law School.
Dev Nag is the founder and CEO of QueryPal. He was previously on the founding team at GLMX, one of the largest electronic securities trading platforms in the money markets. He was also CTO and founder at Wavefront (acquired by VMware) and a senior engineer at Google, where he helped develop the back end for all financial processing of Google ad revenue. He previously served as the manager of business operations strategy at PayPal. He also launched eBay's private-label credit line in association with GE Financial. Dev received a dual-degree B.S. in mathematics and B.A. in psychology from Stanford.
The Senate instead will work on combining the stimulus payments with measures on election integrity and rolling back social media liability protections, he said. That responds to all three issues Trump has said he wants, but a bill combining them likely will alienate enough senators in both parties to leave prospects for bigger stimulus payments dead in the Senate.
“The Senate is not going to be bullied into rushing out more borrowed money into the hands of the Democrats’ rich friends who don’t need the help,” McConnell said. The House bill would raise the income cutoff to receive a payment.
The clash over the payments also is entangling another piece of year-end business in the Senate — a vote to override Trump’s veto of a crucial $740.5 billion defense policy bill. Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey said they will continue to delay the defense legislation vote unless McConnell relents and allows a vote on a standalone bill on the bigger stimulus checks.
“We are saying to Mitch McConnell, to allow the United States Senate to do what it’s supposed to do, and that is the vote,” Sanders told reporters. “The House passed the bill, it’s over here right now. Do you want to vote against it? Then vote against it.”
Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey later blocked an attempt by Sanders to call up the House bill for a roll call vote.