A bill passed by Congress at 3 a.m. EST might be a bill with some problems.
The Hill reports that in the wee hours of this morning, House Republicans managed to pass a bill with funding for research, and to take prevention actions to combat the Zika virus.
The bill was passed while Democrats were staging a sit-in over gun control on the House floor, an exercise that frustrated the Republicans enormously.
Like most of the votes that take place in our rigidly divided government, the Zika decision fell almost exactly along party lines. The funding bill was approved with a vote of 239-171.
The bill would provide $622 million to combat the dangerous mosquito born virus. While that sounds like a significant amount of money, it is only about one-third of what had been requested by the White House and about one-half of what had been requested by the Senate.
Politics prevailed over public health: The House passes a rider-laden, inadequate, funding-cut filled #Zika bill. https://t.co/hUwZ6LWIU5
— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) June 23, 2016
House Democrats reacted furiously, saying that the funding bill is far below what is necessary to fight a virus that is known to cause devastating birth defects in babies of infected mothers.
They were also upset because in order to fund the Zika work, the Republicans slashed funding for other key programs.
In particular, Democrats were upset that money was taken from an ongoing Ebola eradication effort to pay for the Zika research. Representative Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) stated:
“When a tornado strikes, we don’t steal money from the unfinished relief efforts for the last hurricane. Yet House Republicans would take more Ebola funding, risking that it could re-emerge.”
One of the key issues on Zika funding is the timeline. The Senate bill extended the funding through September 2017, but the House version would last only 6 months. That would obviously mean that either Zika eradication efforts would stop, or the Congress would be right back to fighting over the desperately needed money to continue it.
The White House reacted very strongly to the House bill. Press Secretary Josh Earnest said:
‘The only thing that Republicans in the House have come forward with is funding at like a third of the level that our public health experts recommend. That doesn’t make sense at all. That is a dumb approach. And I don’t really understand why— why one would even consider an approach like that.”
Given the bitter nature of the debates in Congress, and the inability of anyone there to compromise, it seems to me that having to reopen the debate in the fall is a very bad idea.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab.
