Political Quotes

“Let me begin by thanking my good friend for her wonderful work on that committee. She has had the opportunity to serve on her subcommittee when she was a subcommittee chairman and now to work with her ranking member. There is no better person than Nita Lowey on that committee. However, we are going to disagree a little bit here. First of all, when you say the bill only provides a third, of course, you have already got a third. The first $600 million is the first third. That has already been deployed. It is being spent. This is the next third. The remaining third is money that will be spent--by the way, not this year, but next year--and it will be presented in the normal appropriations bills. I happen to chair one of those committees, the so-called Labor-HHS Subcommittee, the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. We will have hundreds of millions of dollars in that bill for next year's Zika response. So to suggest that somebody is being shortchanged, the money is just being prudently laid out at an appropriate pace and paid for along the way. That is point number one. Point number two, again, this isn't a debate about the disease. It was this committee and our chairman who immediately responded and said: You have extra money left. Now, by the way, the Ebola money, if you go back and look at the legislation, is Ebola and other infectious diseases.…”