Butler County's representatives are divided on expanding COVID-19 relief stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000, despite the House of Representatives' bipartisan passage of that proposal Monday night.

The Caring for Americans with Supplemental Help — or CASH — Act passed the House with a 275-134 majority Monday, with county Rep. Conor Lamb, D-17th, voting in favor of it and Reps. Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-15th, and Mike Kelly, R-16th, voting against the expanded stimulus.

Lamb, whose district includes part of Cranberry Township, said the broad bipartisan support with which the proposal passed shows the necessity of the increased stimulus.

“You can't get two-thirds of this Congress to agree on much, but tonight we had overwhelming bipartisan votes to increase stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000, and to overturn the president's absurd veto of our bipartisan bill to fund the military and pay our troops,” Lamb said, referring to both the CASH Act and the House's override of President Donald Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act.

But Kelly, who represents much of the western segment of the county, argued the bill increases governmental borrowing and spending in a year with record-setting deficits.

“I support providing direct relief to Pennsylvanians whose current economic struggles were caused by (Gov. Tom) Wolf's lockdown of the Keystone State for most of 2020, but this stimulus check expansion misses the mark because it is not targeted to people who need it most and ignores President Trump's call to reduce wasteful government spending,” Kelly said in a Monday statement.

Thompson could not be reached for comment.

Trump has called on both the House and Senate to boost the stimulus to $2,000 from $600, having last week threatened to veto the appropriations act containing the smaller payments unless Congress agreed to increase the size of the checks. In recent days, however, he has packaged that with calls to “get rid of Section 230” of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which indemnifies companies like Facebook and Twitter for content posted on their websites, and to, citing no evidence of malfeasance, investigate the November presidential election.

House Democrats seized on Trump's call for a larger stimulus, and among those in agreement was Lamb.

“We've asked people to sacrifice a lot this year for the sake of public health — jobs, businesses, wages and working hours, time with loved ones,” he said. “And working families have been forced to wait far too long for their government to provide any support to make those sacrifices just a little bit easier.”

Kelly said future stimulus bills should be in targeted payments, through unemployment or otherwise, to those affected most by both the virus and governmental actions that have forced the closure of businesses.

“Our path forward must include direct relief, spending cuts and opening the commonwealth's economy, so families can go back to work,” he said Monday.

While the House overwhelmingly passed the CASH Act, the bill has not yet had its day in the Senate.On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blocked an immediate vote on the legislation. In a statement, McConnell said the president's most recent pushes to go after “Big Tech” and investigate the election meant the issues should not be considered separately.“Those are the three important subjects the president has linked together,” McConnell said. “This week, the Senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus.”Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said he would not support the legislation, following the same thought process as Kelly. While the $1,200 stimulus payments in the spring made sense “because such a huge percentage of Americans had lost income,” Toomey, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, argued the $2,000 proposal is lacking because it does not focus on the hospitality, travel and entertainment industries that have been harder-hit by COVID-19 than others. He instead called for future stimulus bills to include provisions along the lines of expanded unemployment benefits and the Payroll Protection Program, like the CARES Act passed in March.“This targeted assistance is far more effective, efficient and appropriate than large universal payments to people who had no lost income,” Toomey said. “Blindly borrowing or printing another two-thirds of a trillion dollars, so we can send $2,000 to children, the deceased and tens of millions of workers who haven't missed a paycheck, like federal and state employees, is not sound economic policy nor is it something I am willing to support.”Toomey previously voted no on the appropriations bill passed last week that included the $600 direct payments.The upper chamber isn't immune from the political divisions of Butler County representatives in the House.Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., called on McConnell to let the Senate consider the bill, saying it is incumbent for the 100-member body to at least vote up or down on the stimulus proposal.“Majority Leader McConnell has twice blocked a vote on Democrats' bill to put $2,000 in the pockets of struggling families,” Casey said. “The House passed this measure by an overwhelming majority. The same could happen in the Senate if Majority Leader McConnell would get out of the way.”