WASHINGTON — Despite last-gasp efforts by lawmakers from both parties to revive a measure that would help combat the Zika virus, Democrats rejected the legislation Wednesday, effectively quashing the Senate’s bid to act on the high priority issue before leaving Capitol Hill for a seven-week recess.
The bill would have provided $1.1 billion in funding to rein in the mosquito-transmitted virus that has swept across parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Failure to advance the legislation means Congress will have to wait until September to allocate emergency funding for Zika research and prevention.
Minority Leader Harry Reid had pushed to strike several provisions of the legislation, which Democrats say contains “poison pills,” such as taking money away from Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and relaxing environmental regulations on insecticides.
Their goal was to resurrect an earlier Zika funding plan that cleared the Senate with significant bipartisan support in May. The House too passed a stand-alone Zika bill.
Instead the Zika funding was made part of a larger veterans and military appropriations bill. Senate Democrats fought to detach the Zika funding, and remove language that would use Obamacare funding to offset some of the cost of the money going to combat the disease.
Republicans, however, insisted that the Senate must vote on the larger bill, encompassed in a House-Senate conference report passed by the House late last month. The majority accused Democrats on reneging on previous support for Zika funding.
For several weeks, Democrats have threatened to stall the measure unless Republicans agreed to reenter negotiations.
The conference report put together by Republican leaders from both chambers has drawn staunch opposition from Democrats, who say they were locked out of the talks aimed at reconciling two versions of the bill.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pledged before the short Fourth of July recess that the Senate would vote once more before the long summer break. That vote came with a thud Thursday afternoon.
The failed Zia vote – an inability to choke off a threatened filibuster –measure came a day after Centers of Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Friedan told lawmakers on a Foreign Relations subcommittee that the center wouldn’t be able to continue research on the virus unless it received emergency funding.
“We will do the best we can, but this is no way to fight epidemics,” Friedan said. “It means we can’t begin the long-term projects, figure out how to protect women more effectively, to come up with better ways to diagnose Zika, to accelerate mosquito control strategies because we haven’t been able to invest in those things.”
The Zika virus has been linked to severe birth defects in children born to mothers infected with the virus, and can also be sexually transmitted. The CDC issued advisories earlier this year warning pregnant women to avoid travel to Zika-prone regions.
During that Wednesday hearing, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., insisted, “It was a clean bill; it was a bill about one thing: fighting Zika – that’s what it was about. When it comes back to us, the bill is not about fighting Zika. Frankly, it’s about fighting Planned Parenthood, and paying for it by taking money out of the Affordable Care Act.”
Taunting her rivals, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., added, “What happened to that bill? That wonderful bill that my chairman voted for, that I voted for, that we all voted for? … On Wednesday It disappeared down the black hole of partisanship.”
But Republicans hammered away at Democrats for opposing what they said was legislation supporting veterans, and also Zika prevention in the midst of mosquito season throughout most of the United States.
“Think about veterans over the summer; think about our men and women in uniform,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday. “And then they’ll (Democrats) have to decide, do they want to continue with these partisan games on critical issues like Zika and national defense? Or do they want to work with us to keep making progress for our country?”
More than 1,300 cases of Zika have already been reported in the U.S., however, nearly all of them were contracted during travel abroad.