House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., left, Rep. Michael C. Burgess, R-Texas, right, and other House Republicans rush to a closed-door GOP caucus with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2016.
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Democrats also criticized Republicans for preparing to leave Washington without assisting Flint, Michigan, with its water crisis and inaction on gun control after a recent spate of mass shootings.
One is the National Institutes of Health-led continued “aggressive” development of “test vaccine candidates and platforms to protect the population from the spread of Zika”. “When they were in the majority, they didn’t want to pass appropriation bills”.
Democrats have objected to the amount – the White House originally requested $1.9 billion in emergency funds – and new politically-loaded additions to the bill.
“It’s going to take that much longer to prove that the vaccine works”, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who says testing next January on a promising vaccine faces delays. Members of Congress are getting ready to take an unusually long summer break – they’ll wrap up this week and won’t return to work until September 6 – which generally leads to a flurry of legislative activity before lawmakers leave town.
In a pitch to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called for striking several provisions in the Zika measure loathed by Democrats.
In May, the Senate approved a bipartisan bill to provide $1.1 billion to fight Zika.
Today, Sen. Bill Nelson called for consideration of a $1.1 billion funding bill that already passed the Senate. McConnell said Democrats would have to decide whether they would again this week block the GOP-backed measure, which passed the House last month nearly entirely along partisan lines.
In exchange, Democrats would have accepted a modest package of spending cuts to help defray the cost of the measure.
McConnell, however, dismissed the offer, refusing to disavow the House GOP position on denying new money to Planned Parenthood and saying it is too late and too cumbersome to try to advance a new compromise measure in the days remaining before the recess.
“We have reached the 11th hour as a failure to authorize the resources necessary to fight Zika puts Americans at risk at the peak of mosquito season”, Buchanan said. “Our friends across the aisle will have to decide if they feel the same or if a partisan political group is worth delaying funding to protect families from Zika”.
“This could be the most important legislation Congress passes this year, and there’s no excuse for not finishing our work in September”, the Tennessee Republican said in a statement, noting that the package would include funding for President Obama’s precision medicine initiative and Vice President Joe Biden’s cancer research program.
Mr. Reid has said it’s too little and comes with too many strings attached – including language that would prevent Planned Parenthood from gaining access to the money.
Disclosure: My wife works for Planned Parenthood, but she played no role in this piece, and her work is unrelated to the Zika response. “It’s beyond shameful that Washington can’t work together to stop future devastation caused by this deadly virus”.
But Democrats cite specific problems with each of the bills and will block two of the three, reluctantly allowing only the opioid bill to make it to President Barack Obama’s desk to become law despite being underfunded in their view.
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During the negotiations, Democrats made clear they thought the policies to promote treatment and prevention were essentially toothless without new money.
