Jeff Bingaman: “Mr. President I will speak for a very few minutes on this same issue and indicate my strong support for the amendment…”

“Mr. President I will speak for a very few minutes on this same issue and indicate my strong support for the amendment Senator Byrd has offered. As my colleague, Senator Harkin, indicated, I strongly support this amendment. I believe this is the obvious follow-on to the vote we had last week where 78 Members of the Senate agreed when appropriations bills did come to the Senate we would vote to fully appropriate the funds that were authorized in the United States Leadership Against HIV/ AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003. That was legislation we passed earlier this year that I strongly supported. It did provide $15 billion worth of funds. It authorized $15 billion worth of funding for this purpose. It was a follow-on to the President's State of the Union speech. In the State of the Union speech, the President committed this country to this initiative. I strongly supported it. Then, as a follow-on to that State of the Union speech, we passed the authorizing legislation which, as I understood it, said we will appropriate $3 billion a year for 5 years in order to fight this terrible epidemic of infectious disease we see around the world.”