Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, there has been a great deal of discussion this morning about the Ebola fund and how it is being used and in what ways it is going to be used. Let me just go back and make a few points to clarify that situation. When Congress acted, it appropriated almost $6 billion for Ebola. That money was to be spent over years. It wasn't really clear whether it was too much or, frankly, not enough. We simply didn't know. Now, the reality is, even after the amounts of money that my friend has talked about that have been shifted from Ebola to deal with Zika, that fund still has over $1.7 billion in it, more than enough to finance all the planned activity not only for this fiscal year, but all of next fiscal year. This is a multiyear fund. When you are in an emergency, it makes sense to take money like that and move it over, particularly with the assurance that that money will be replaced, as needed, in the regular appropriations process. The administration itself is doing the same thing. In its own budget, it proposed taking money out of the Ebola fund and spending it on something else that it thought was more immediate. So the idea that this is somehow unprecedented or different than what the administration is doing is simply not true. Now, the reality is--again, my friends seem to imply or perhaps believe that there is something that hasn't been done to date that the Federal Government wanted to do on Zika.…”