Political Quotes

“I begin by pointing out to my good friend that, actually, we are doing, in a sense, what he is urging us to do right now. We are moving expeditiously to go to conference with our friends in the Senate, who have passed one version of the Zika response. We will have our version. We will sit down and work out a compromise, and I suspect we will be able to move pretty smartly through this. What we are doing here today is exactly what I know my friend wants us to do, and that is to move and respond. I also point out--and it gets lost in the rhetoric sometimes around this issue--that there is not one thing the Federal Government has proposed to do about Zika that it has been unable to do because of a lack of money. The Federal Government has had every cent that it has asked for. Frankly, it was Hal Rogers, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who solicited Ms. Granger, the chairman of the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Agencies, and I, as the chair of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, to write the administration and tell them to start spending money immediately from the things they had. Then that money would be backfilled as needed during the normal appropriations process. That is exactly what has been done. No measure has failed to be implemented because of a lack of money.…”