It’s stories like this that can make my blood boil. The Zika virus puts newborns at risk of suffering from “… microcephaly, severe brain malformations, and other birth defects.” These are typically irreversible problems. Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog reports on efforts to fund the research effort on Zika by Congress:
It’s a pretty straightforward plan Senate Dems are proposing: if both parties are roughly in agreement on the amount of money that needs to be invested, the bill can pass the chamber if Republicans would simply agree to remove thepoison-pill provisions – blocking Planned Parenthood funding, taking funds from efforts to combat the Ebola virus, and cutting the Affordable Care Act – that Democrats can’t accept.
But the Republicans continue to refuse, making the current bill – a compromise Senate Republicans struck with House Republicans – a take-it-or-leave-it offer: either Democrats play along with the GOP’s culture-war priorities, or there will be no federal response to the Zika threat.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, which sent Congress an emergency funding request back in February,reminded lawmakers yesterday that political gridlock “could delay research and development of a vaccine to protect against Zika and tests to detect it.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told ABC News yesterday, “We getting to the point where both the CDC and the NIH are actually running out of money, and we have important work to do.”
And so, with Congress going into a long summer break, time is lost.
Does the GOP understand how the Democrats can use this against them? I suggest, in a breathy woman’s voice:
Incumbent XYZ voted to withhold funding for research on the terrifying Zika virus [add photos of diseased infants] because they are miffed at the success of ObamaCare and Planned Parenthood at easing the plight of low income Americans.
Once again the GOP looks like a dysfunctional political machine fixated on getting its priorities into law in any way possible, never mind the ethical questions surrounding their methods. They are in danger of being an illustration that ethics aren’t abstract directives which can be broken if the objective is Important, but instead are rules for ensuring good long-term outcomes. You break them and the world falls in on your head.
And, say, aren’t there rules about saddling legislation with amendments not associated with the main point of the legislation?
