Political Quotes

“I rise to voice my concern as an American and my outrage as a grandfather-to-be about the lack of action to fund our response to the Zika epidemic. Zika has come to Miami, FL, and Congress needs to step up and provide the necessary funds to fight this terrible virus. Zika is like any other national emergency, and we are a nation that always--always--responds to emergencies. While I am encouraged with the news that Republicans are seeing fit to do their job and drop some of the conditions in their Zika bill, which this body has voted down three times already, there is no excuse for any further delay--no excuse for doing nothing while Americans face a risk that we have the power to mitigate. The alarms have been ringing for months. We knew Zika wasn't coming, but instead of being proactive and prepared for what was about to hit our shores, Republicans in Congress chose to poison our response with rightwing ideological policy riders that prevented us from appropriately addressing this issue. To make matters worse, rather than removing these unacceptable provisions from the bill, they simply chose to ignore it entirely and send Congress on vacation without acting. Since that time, we have had at least 43 instances of locally acquired Zika in the Miami area and nearly 16,000 locally acquired cases in Puerto Rico. In the 50 United States, we now have 3,000 total cases, including those that were acquired outside of the country.…”