[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 105 (Wednesday, June 29, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4684-S4685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 ZIKA VIRUS AND VA-MILCON FUNDING BILL

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, the Republican leader came here yesterday 
and came here again this morning talking about Zika.
  Understand how the House of Representatives works--and stunningly, 
the Republicans over here accept what they do in the House. In the 
House of Representatives, they have what is called the Hastert rule, 
named after a Congressman from Illinois who was the Speaker of the 
House for a number of years. He created what was called the Hastert 
rule. What that was is, you had to deal only with legislation that had 
enough votes to pass it with Republican votes. They didn't want 
Democrats to be involved, and they are still that way.
  Even though Hastert's in prison, they follow the Hastert rule. As a 
result of that, in the dead of night last week, Republicans in the 
House--and I mean the dead of the night. Remember the House had been 
taken over by the House Democrats because they were upset about what 
had not been done with guns. The event was interrupted for probably 
less than a minute, and the House was called back into session. The 
House passed with no discussion whatsoever the conference report 
dealing with Zika.
  As could only be understood by someone understanding what the Hastert 
rule is, here is what they did. They had to get all the crazies over 
there--I am sorry to use that term. That is the term Speaker Boehner 
used, and the more I see of this, I think he had it pretty down pat. 
They did everything they could to go after all the pet projects of 
Republicans. They hate Planned Parenthood. They hate it, even though 
millions of Americans get their care there. This Zika disease causes 
young women to be concerned about birth control. About one out of every 
five women will get care at Planned Parenthood at some point in their 
lives. But what did Republicans do? They said: We are going to restrict 
funding for birth control provided by Planned Parenthood. Why would 
they do that? Only to get votes from those crazies over there.
  They exempted pesticide spraying from clean water. What we need to do 
with these mosquitoes--in addition to inventing vaccines and other 
medicines to fight this plague, we also have to kill the mosquitoes, 
and we do that by spraying. That works better than anything else. Of 
course, the Republicans, hating environmental laws, went after the 
Clean Water Act, which has been in existence for decades.
  Just to make sure that they covered all their bases, they whacked 
veterans funding by $500 million below the Senate bill. Those were for 
processing claims of veterans. What do we hear complaints about? 
Processing claims. Well, they took care of that. They want to cut $500 
million from Secretary McDonald's budget so he cannot process claims 
very quickly. It cuts Ebola funding by $107 million and rescinds $543 
million from ObamaCare. Just for good measure, I guess they had to make 
sure they had all the southern votes. They said: What we are going to

[[Page S4685]]

do now is strike a prohibition on displaying the Confederate flag. So 
if they got their way, you could fly Confederate flags on any military 
cemetery you want. And, of course, it sets a terrible precedent by 
offsetting emergency spending with offsets like ObamaCare, cutting 
Ebola money.

  We did the right thing. All the press--you might find a headline 
someplace on some rightwing blog, but the fact is, the Republicans know 
they failed on funding Zika, and all the press indicates that is the 
case.

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