Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced on Monday that his caucus in the Senate will continue its silent filibuster against a $1.1 billion bill intended to combat the Zika virus and develop a vaccine against it.
The Democrats’ determination to stop what Reid calls “one of the worst pieces of legislation I’ve ever seen in this body” threatens to leave no emergency funding to stop the virus for the next seven weeks.
Reid is threatening to shut down the government’s efforts against the mosquito-borne and sexually transmitted virus, which can cause horrible birth defects in utero and has already become a major problem in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.
The worst part of this Democratic obstruction is his reasoning. They are fighting this bill because it contains a minor provision they detest, which is ancillary to the bill’s most important aims.
The legislation agreed to as a compromise between the House and Senate cuts out the Puerto Rico arm of Planned Parenthood. The organization, which performs abortions on an industrial scale, funds Democratic political campaigns. And it takes the view, as any self-interested business might be expected to do, that no aid package is acceptable unless it contains additional money for itself.
We don’t generally think much of the fact-checking website Politifact, which has its own left-liberal biases, but it has essentially debunked Democrats’ claims that this provision makes the aid package less effective. The website notes that there are only seven Profamilias (Planned Parenthood) clinics in Puerto Rico, and that there is not a single municipality where it is the only organization with a clinic to serve the community.
“[E]verywhere Profamilias lists a clinic … has another type of facility that would have been eligible for additional funding to combat the spread of Zika,” the fact-checking website states.
But the work of any clinic is unimportant to the bill’s main aims. The most important work, by far, is the project at the National Institutes of Health to test and deploy a vaccine against the virus.
As President Obama has already said, the vaccine could be available to the public in “fairly short order.” Until that part of the solution is funded and deployed the public will have to live with the worry that Zika will spread. Democrats are extending the period of worry because they say abortion is their touchstone and they won’t let the spread of birth defects get in the way of sluicing taxpayer funds to their political ally.
Democrats need to reexamine their priorities. This is not the first time they’ve contorted themselves to protect the interests of the organization that performs between one-third and two-fifths of all abortions in the U.S. But it is by far the most grotesque example.
In this instance, a fanatical dedication to the cause of subsidizing this organization has led them to block the bill that could protect Puerto Ricans and the rest of the country — indeed, the rest of the world — against the spread of a horrible virus.
Democrats lost control of the Senate in the last election. They are in no better position morally to shut down the government now than Republicans were when they tried to stop Obamacare in 2013. Reid needs to abandon his political games and obstruction and think more of protecting lives.
