National Sea Grant College Program Amendments Act of 2015
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Vermont, who is next, for yielding me just a couple minutes.
I want to be brief and to the point. Congress is 1 week away from recessing before the conventions. We have yet to appropriate significant funds to fight Zika. At this point, quite frankly, I don't care whose fault it is anymore--Republicans or Democrats. This whole partisan argument that is going on around this issue is inexcusable.
Every single day now we have massive numbers of Zika cases being reported in my home State. Every day new records are being set. Just today a new case was found in a county that hadn't had a case yet. Forty-five out of fifty States in this country now have a Zika case. We have yet to see a local transmission, but it is coming, and I don't know, for the life of me, how anyone in this Chamber can go back home a week from now and say: We are going to be on recess for 6 weeks, in the peak of the summer, in the peak of mosquito season, in the peak of travel season, and we have appropriated nothing for the Zika virus. This makes no sense to me.
Do you want to know why Congress's approval rating is at 1, 2, or 3 percent, if that? It is because on an issue of public health we cannot find a way forward. My hope is that in the days to come, we will have an understanding that allows us to move forward. I am not just talking to the Senate, I am also talking to the House. Let's appropriate money and move forward and deal with this issue appropriately, with the urgency it deserves, or everyone is going to have to answer to their constituents as to why this public health crisis has blossomed and bloomed and we did nothing about it.
I truly hope, in the hours and days leading up to our recess, we will find a rapid and quick way forward so we can address this and fix it and give our people the help they need in the short term and ultimately move toward the money we need to research for a vaccine so this issue can be prevented and this disease can be prevented from spreading in the future.
Thank you, Mr. President.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source