All five members of the US House of Central Pennsylvania voted against an accelerated bill on Monday that would increase the second round of stimulus payments for most Americans from $ 600 to $ 2,000.
The move came to life in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives last week after President Donald J. Trump criticized the size of the new stimulus checks as too small.
Forty-four Republicans joined the vast majority of Democrats on Monday to pass the bill in a vote of 275 to 134 – narrowly eliminating the two-thirds limit they needed to pass quickly. But his fate in the Republican-controlled Senate is much less certain.
All members of the middle state delegation voted against the larger checks on Monday.
Many of them, such as US Representative Scott Perry of R-York County and US Representative Lloyd Smucker of R-Lancaster County, have officially declared that they think general-issued stimulus checks are an extravagant overreaction to pandemic, and that relief should be more targeted at individuals and families who have actually seen job losses or income reductions because of the recession.
Approval of $ 2,000 stimulus checks would cost an additional $ 464 billion over the $ 900 billion package that Congress passed before Christmas and that Trump signed on Sunday, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Republican congressmen had been trying to keep the total price of the new stimulus package below $ 1 trillion, but that was before Trump started his Twitter-fueled campaign last week to make stimulus payments higher.
Democrats say they like higher payments because they think that – along with an extension of reinforced unemployment checks – they will have a greater impact on helping the economy withstand the latest increase in the pandemic.
In other news from Washington on Monday, the state’s middle delegation found itself split in a vote from 322 to 87 to overturn Trump’s veto of the 2021 defense spending bill.
Representatives Lloyd Smucker of R-Lancaster County and John Joyce of R-Blair County switched positions on Monday, voting to maintain Trump’s veto after originally supporting the defense spending bill.
Joyce, in a statement after Monday’s vote, said she voted with Trump on the veto out of respect for the president’s calls to make the defense bill “even stronger for our uniformed men and women.”
But Trump’s opposition to the defense act focused mainly on including language that would strike the names of Confederate generals from a range of military installations, and because it did not include language that revokes liability protections for technology companies like Facebook and Twitter about content that third parties post on their platforms.
Representatives Fred Keller of R-Snyder County and Dan Meuser of R-Luzerne County voted in favor of the original bill and in support of the annulment on Monday, while Perry opposed the initial bill and supported the veto. of the president.
The annulment of the veto also now goes to the Senate for a final decision.