Senate Democrats say they will block a Zika funding measure that the Republican majority plans to call up for a vote in the coming days, and are blaming the stalemate on “bizarre” House lawmakers.
“It is so bad,” Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said of the House version of the bill.
Democrats last week blocked a $1.1 billion measure to provide federal funding to combat Zika, and criticized the legislation because it shifts money from other federal funds instead of allowing more emergency spending that adds to the deficit. Democrats said the bill also includes “poison pills” they cannot support, such as a provision allowing mosquito spraying near water and another preventing Zika money allocated to Puerto Rico from going to Planned Parenthood clinics on the island.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the Zika funding measure would be up for a vote before the Senate departs for a summer recess extended by two weeks because of the July political conventions.
McConnell noted Democrats supported an earlier version of measure that passed the Senate, although it excluded offsets and the so-called poison pill language.
“Hopefully our Democratic friends will vote the way they did the first time when the bill went through the Senate,” McConnell said Wednesday.
Reid blamed the Zika impasse on the House, where Republicans required spending offsets for the $1.1 billion before they would support the bill.
The legislation is partly paid for with $543 million from an unused fund provided to create Obamacare health insurance exchanges, and more than $100 million that had been allocated to combat the now-receded Ebola virus.
“They won’t pass a bill unless they get a majority of the majority and that is hard to do because of the bizarre members in that body,” Reid said, referring to conservative House fiscal hawks.
Reid added that the “bizarre group of people” had pushed out former Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who was replaced last year by Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
“I don’t know how much longer Ryan can put up with it,” Reid said.
The Senate’s number-three Democrat called on the GOP to rewrite the bill.
“It’s not going to become law, period,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said. “So we need to start a new round of negotiations.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Wednesday also blamed Republicans for insisting that the Zika funding is paid for.
“There are pregnant women and newborn babies all across the country that are at risk,” he said. “And the fact is our public health professionals have not been able to do every single thing possible to protect us because they haven’t gotten adequate resources and adequate funding from the United States Congress.”
Earnest said White House talks with Republicans in Congress on Zika have been “intensely frustrating.”
“[W]hen faced with this significant emergency, Republicans have not acted on the specific request that our public health professionals have made for funding,” he said.
Nicole Duran contributed
