Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Warren Ponto, the committee's detailee from the FAA, be allowed privileges of the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

There is a direct link, I would say, Mr. President, in response to the Senator, between a pregnant woman being infected with the Zika virus and the probability that she will deliver a child who is deformed.

Yes, sir. And I know that mosquitoes are all over Florida, but now this one strain of mosquito, the aegypti, for dinner feeds not on one human but on four. If the mosquito has the Zika virus, each of those four would then be infected with…

If you think of the building of the Panama Canal, mosquitoes transmitted malaria. So mosquitoes are a vector which transmits a lot of diseases. This strain of mosquito can lay its larvae in stagnant water contained in something as small as…

I say to the Senator from Illinois, with 276 cases of infection, with 43 pregnant women that we know of just in the State of Florida, is it any wonder that 5 months ago, when we filed the $1.9 billion request of the administration, my…

Amen to that, and here we are dithering with these political games. We wonder why the American public is so turned off when they see what is going on up here, and here is one of the very best examples of an emergency.

Not only that, but with bipartisan support early on in this whole dialogue. And now we are seeing the resistance of the majority leader to take up the very bill that passed with those overwhelming numbers of bipartisan support.

Mr. President, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.

That, of course, I say to the Senator from Illinois, is such a poor, poor choice.

Not only the good fortune but the great privilege, and now I have the opportunity to work on the policy for the Nation's space program.

Not only is that true, but it is also indicative of how ideologically driven and how partisan driven so much of the activity here in this Capitol building is, which is what is very distasteful to the American people.