Getting Our Work Done
Floor Speech
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am joining with the others who are here on the floor today who have called on the majority leader of the Senate to stay here and to take action on matters of critical importance to the American people.
On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court will begin its new term, and it will do so with a vacancy that has remained unfilled for the last 6 months. Regrettably, the President's nominee to the Court, Judge Merrick Garland, has not even been given the courtesy of a nomination hearing. This is the first time in the history of this country--in the history of the country--that the majority party in leadership has refused to have a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. It is unconscionable. No wonder the people of America are frustrated with the Congress.
Likewise, the Senate has failed to act with urgency to address the Zika outbreak. I will have more to say about this shortly.
First and foremost, I wanted to come to the floor today to discuss the Senate's failure to provide appropriate emergency funding to address the heroin and opioid epidemic. This epidemic is raging in all 50 States. It is an uncontrolled public health epidemic of the first order. In 2014, some 47,000 people in this country died from drug overdoses--far more than we lose in motor vehicle accidents. Yet despite the staggering death toll, the majority in the Senate has failed to pass legislation to provide emergency funding to first responders, to treatment providers, to law enforcement, and to those who are on the frontlines in this crisis.
In July, Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA. It is a good bipartisan bill. It is a bill I cosponsored and I voted for. But as we all know here, if we are being honest with the public, CARA is an authorizing bill. It is not an appropriations bill. It doesn't provide one penny to fight the opioid epidemic. Even if Congress approves the funding necessary for CARA, it will be about 2 years before New Hampshire and other States see that additional funding.
In New Hampshire we have the highest percentage of overdose deaths in the country. Everywhere I go in the State, I hear that what people need is the resources to address this crisis. That is why early this year I introduced an emergency funding bill to provide an additional $600 million for policing, prevention, treatment, and recovery. I offered this legislation as an amendment to the CARA bill, but it was defeated with only five of our Republican colleagues voting for it. Again, this is unconscionable. Our Nation has addressed other public health crises with emergency funding bills far larger than the one proposed to address the heroin and opioid epidemic.
Last year, about a year and a half ago, Congress passed nearly $5.4 billion in emergency funding to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The Ebola outbreak killed one person in America. He wasn't an American. The heroin and opioid epidemic is killing more than 128 people every single day. We know that treatment is the only effective answer to the opioid addiction and that people are being turned away from treatment due to lack of resources. Nationwide in 2013, nearly 9 out of 10 people needing drug treatment didn't receive it. It is the same story on the law enforcement side of the equation. There is a chronic lack of resources.
Heroin traffickers expressly target rural States and counties where law enforcement is spread too thin and lacks resources to respond effectively--places such as northern New Hampshire and northern New England. My legislation would provide $200 million in emergency funding for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program, which is the flagship crimefighting program that has been cut year after year in a process that has been penny-wise and pound-foolish. It is budgeting at its very worst.
Meanwhile, as Congress fails to act, as Senator McCaskill has shown so well, as we have not been here to work, the opioid epidemic is on the verge of expanding dramatically.
Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid that is used to tranquilize elephants. It is now available on the streets and is blamed for a record surge in drug overdoses in the Midwest. Carfentanil is 100 times more potent than fentanyl. Fentanyl is an additive that we have seen turning up in New Hampshire and in so many other places that makes heroin 50 times more deadly. Until recently, Hamilton County, OH, had four or five overdoses a day. Now, because of carfentanil, the county is reporting 20, 30, or sometimes even 50 overdoses a day, completely overwhelming first responders.
Some public health officials say that the United States has reached a disastrous inflection point in the opioid epidemic. Going forward, we may be seeing more and more synthetic opioids in the market that are cheaper, more potent, more addictive, and even more deadly. This is just one more wake-up call.
The hour is late, and as I travel across New Hampshire and talk to Senate colleagues from across the country, again and again I hear about the lack of resources to marshal an effective, well-coordinated response. As the new and more dangerous synthetic opioids hit the streets, the crisis is becoming exponentially worse, and Congress's failure to act, the fact that we are, again, going home very soon means that more people will die before we take action.
If Congress can spend billions to fight an Ebola outbreak in a distant continent, surely we can allocate $600 million to combat a raging epidemic back home if we stayed here and if we worked together to get this done.
I also want to raise the issue of the Zika outbreak, as my colleagues have--again, this is one more area--because, while the Senate has been out of session, while Congress has been out of session, while we have been at a standstill, Zika has been on the move with tragic consequences.
Local transmission of Zika is now taking place in the State of Florida. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1,750 pregnant women in the United States and Puerto Rico have tested positive for the Zika virus, and that means their babies are at risk. We are not even sure exactly what all their babies might be at risk for because we are still trying to get the research to determine what all of the impacts of Zika are.
We know microcephaly is one of the birth defects that results from the Zika virus. Since January, I have joined with other Senators in calling for a robust response to the Zika outbreak because we need Congress to act. In fact, the Senate did act. We acted before we went out in August with a bipartisan vote of 89 people, but then we saw the House----
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Now it is time to put politics aside and work together, to stay here and do what the American people need.
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