Congress Is Using Zika To Show How Terrible Congress Is

The GOP lead Congress puts American's and the unborn at risk by playing politics and taking a vacation instead of passing legislation to fight the Zika disease. Where are the pro-life people on this one?

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/congress-zika_us_57471eabe4b055bb11716c06


Congress managed to beat the Memorial Day vacation traffic by fleeing town on Thursday. But what it failed to do before taking 10 days off was pass a bill that gives health officials the funding they estimate they need to combat the Zika virus.

What Congress did instead is offer an object lesson in what’s wrong with Congress, treating the need to respond to Zika not as a public health emergency that’s already affected more than 1,500 Americans, but as an opportunity to pass other things, usually things the public doesn’t want.

It began in February when the Obama administration, advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asked Congress to approve $1.9 billion in emergency funding to begin dealing with Zika. The virus is especially dangerous to pregnant women, who, according to a new study, have up to a 13 percent chanceof delivering a baby with microcephaly.

The idea had been to begin getting ready for the mosquitoes that carry Zika well before the start of summer breeding season, and to dramatically ramp up vaccine research, education and mitigation efforts. Congress decided that the administration already had enough money. The White House had to transfer $589 million from its successful, ongoing Ebola response to get started.

And that’s when Congress started treating the still-standing funding request (the administration wants to replace that Ebola funding) as an opportunity.

The Senate, rather than simply bringing up a bill to answer the request, decided to attach it to a must-pass spending bill. Republicans, when offered the chance to consider a clean Zika bill, said they might do so — but only if Democrats agreed to Obamacare cuts.