Bill Nelson

The encryption thing does trouble all of us.

I have often thought of our ability to protect ourselves in cyber as that we are really almost like the standoff in the nuclear, assured mutual destruction.

Not only is that true, I say to the Senator, but there is the fact that this is an emergency, which has always been dealt with in the history of this Senate as a bipartisan thing to meet the situation of the emergency, and now this has…

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…

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

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.

Not only is that true, those four things, but then the House of Representatives put it on a very good bill, the MILCON appropriations, and they sent it down here thinking that we were going to have to take it at the eleventh hour with all…

Not only is it true, but with 100 Senators, when something passes with 89 votes, that is a pretty strong consensus.

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.

It is true, and not only is it true that the President requested it, but immediately, a whole bunch of us out here filed a bill and brought it to the attention of the Senate, and it is now 5 months later.

It is a political message that is so reviled by the people of America. They want us to get down to the business. If Senator McConnell had a flood or an earthquake in Kentucky, we would all support him with emergency funding to meet that…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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.

Through the Chair, Mr. President, I would answer the Senator. Yes, my family came to Florida right after Florida was acquired as a territory from Spain.

I will predict that shortly, in the next few years, if not immediately, you will see an extension even on out to the end of the decade.

We certainly ought to expand the authorization of the Space Station.

Change can be good, but let me state unequivocally that it's the position of the Coalition that major disruptions stemming from abrupt shifts in space policy risk derailing all of the progress that's been made and jeopardize our future as…

In 2021, NASA will return American astronauts to deep space.

All of this goes back to when my colleague from Texas Kay Bailey Hutchison and I had the opportunity of bringing in for a landing, the new direction of NASA in the 2010 NASA Authorization.

So we're going to Mars, and the rockets and the engines and the spacecraft that are the building blocks of that mission are now being assembled and getting ready to test.

We're going to Mars, and we're going with human beings, and it's going to be in the decade of the 2030s.

We need the Space Station up there, as a platform to do the testing.