Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, we just passed a NASA bill in the Commerce Committee, and we are going to Mars. We are going to Mars in the decade of the 2030s with humans, and the bill sets the goal of having a colonization of other worlds. This is a new and exciting time in our Nation's space exploration program and particularly now with the human exploration program. I thought that would be good news for the Senate. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, we have a bit of good news because earlier today the CDC, or the Centers for Disease Control, announced that it had lifted its travel advisory to not go into a section north of downtown Miami called Wynwood. It is the neighborhood where the first locally transmitted Zika virus was found. So the fact that they said today that this area is no longer considered an area of active transmission is certainly good news, not only for those who live there but for those businesses that are dependent on those who are planning to visit there. That is just one area of Florida. There are now 835 active cases of Zika-infected people in the State of Florida. If you compare that to the number for the total United States, talking about infections, in 49 of the 50 States, it is 3,132. If you add our brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico and the territories, fellow American citizens, 17,315 are infected with the Zika virus. In Florida, 86 pregnant women are infected with the Zika virus. The total in the Nation is 731. In Puerto Rico--primarily there, although bringing in all the territories, it is 1,156. Combining Puerto Rico, the territories, and the United States, we are talking about close to 2,000 pregnant women infected with the Zika virus. We know that the CDC has said that there is anywhere from a 1-percent to 12-percent chance--if a woman is infected in the first trimester of pregnancy, there is a 1- to 12-percent chance that her baby will be born with defects. If you do the math on the nearly 2,000 pregnant women, we are talking about a substantial number of birth defects, including the possibility of what we have heard about and seen-- microcephaly, babies with a deformed brain and shrunken head. In Puerto Rico they already had one live birth of microcephaly and they had one who did not live after birth. We can expect to see huge numbers coming on down the line. That is all the more reason for us--since we started our request for funding last spring--to get at this by doing a Zika vaccine. It is now ready to go into the FDA first trials. A vaccine is at least 2 years away, but we have to get started, and that costs money. The administration has been robbing Peter to pay Paul, finding every little pot of money that it can borrow from since last spring in order to try to fund the preventive measures of a vaccine, mosquito control, and all the attendant health expenditures through our health care centers that are sponsored and paid for by the government, and particularly for the very poor. As a matter of fact, the government raided the Ebola fund of $576 million to advance it to Zika. Well, we need to pay back all of those funds that were raided, and that is incumbent upon us now here at the last minute before we adjourn to go home to campaign before the election. You know, those words are suddenly similar to the words we used in early July, trying to get that done before the summer recess for the political conventions. Yet we did not. The good news is that it looks as though there is now an agreement on Zika. As a result, we can come up with a funding bill to keep the government open until we can pass a permanent funding bill for this fiscal year starting October 1. We will pass a temporary one until sometime in early December. That will give us a chance to try to do the permanent one. In the meantime, the government has to stay open. We have to fund the functions of government, including national security and the U.S. Department of Defense. So one would think that this bill would be all done, but, unrelated to Zika, there are other issues that are threatening the funding bill. At the end of the day, we will get it done. Some of the issues are over as arcane a subject as who is going to administer the issuance of domain names on the Internet. There seems to be some controversy over that. As a result, we are here at the last minute, at the last hour, having to act on a funding bill, and now we have issues that are now all wound around the axle again. I want to say very positively that I appreciate the progress that is being made on the Zika funding. It is not as if we haven't tried this before. Last May we had a bill that passed in a bipartisan fashion for $1.1 billion that did not have the attached political riders. It passed in the Senate by 89 votes out of 100 Senators. Then, of course, the bill in the House of Representatives got all wound up with all kinds of political messaging. I want to state very positively that I am very happy that it seems as if those issues have been put aside and there has been an agreement reached. Now let's get through the rest of this on the funding bill and go ahead and execute our responsibilities that we have to the United States of America. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I want to praise the work of a local elected official in Florida who has admirably served as supervisor of elections in Lake County, FL. This is an elected position in which she has now served for 44 years, and she is going to retire from her position as the chief elections officer after this upcoming election in November. That is an incredible tenure of public service, and Emogene Stegall should be commended for being the longtime supervisor of elections. ``Emogene'' is a name that is almost synonymous with ``Lake County'' because she has been an elected official for nearly half a century. What is so special about her is not only how many years she has held the office but how she embodied the details and the ideals of public service. Since she was first elected in 1972, a lot has changed about the way elections are conducted, but through all of those decades, the same fundamental principles have guided Emogene Stegall's work: a dedication to treating all voters fairly without any regard for party affiliation and safeguarding taxpayer dollars--no partisan politics, no attention- grabbing headlines, just humble public service. Before being elected supervisor, Emogene had already worked 14 years as the supervisor's deputy, starting in 1958. At that time there were only about 17,000 registered voters in Lake County and a handful of voting machines. Most of it was done by paper ballot. Her office used typewriters and carbon paper to function, and voting results were announced on the radio. Fast-forward to today. Emogene has been reelected many times over since winning her first election in 1972, and the number of registered voters in the county has gone from 17,000 to over 200,000. Now the supervisor's office is filled with computers, and computer programs tally the votes on election day before publishing them on the Internet so the voters receive almost instant results. Even with all these changes, Emogene is still there, opening her office to constituents of all political stripes and working long hours to make sure election day runs smoothly and that all citizens in Lake County can exercise their constitutional right to vote. Her principled approach to fulfilling her responsibilities explains why she has continued to be reelected to her post time and time again even though she is a registered Democrat in a county that shifted to Republican control long ago. The changes Emogene has witnessed run deeper than the office equipment and the party politics. When she was first elected, Lake County, along with much of the South of the United States, was still suffering from the scourge of Jim Crowe. African Americans in particular were often denied the right to vote. Even after the civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, the country still needed public servants to implement the law without prejudice in order to usher in change and combat racism. Emogene's steadfast commitment to ensuring the people's right to vote helped achieve that transformation and in a way brings our Nation closer to realizing the ideal of equality that we have reached and have tried to reach since our founding. It is also notable that Emogene Stegall served as the first woman elected official and community leader at a time when women's educational and professional opportunities were much more limited than today. After so many decades of public service, Emogene will oversee her last election day this November. But her legacy for being a committed and tireless public servant will continue to be remembered. She has used her position to benefit the community she was elected to serve. She never was elected, nor used it, for herself or her own interests. Emogene Stegall is an example for all of us in public service. So I am honored to share her story and acknowledge her accomplishments on this occasion today on the floor of the Senate as Emogene Stegall will conduct and is preparing for her last election as Supervisor of Elections. What a great public service. What a great public servant whom we can honor today. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I want to say to the Senator from Illinois that that was an excellent recitation of what the Affordable Care Act has done to ensure health insurance and provide health care for the people of our country. This Senator just wants to underscore one statistic that the Senator from Illinois cited. The Senator cited that 20 million people in the country have health insurance who did not have it before. If the Senator would recall, when we started this deliberation on cobbling together this new law, we were told that there were approximately 45 million people in the country who did not have health insurance. Now, when you break down that 45 million, 11 million of them are undocumented and, therefore, under the law are not eligible to have health insurance. So that leaves 34 million. When you take the 20 million that presently have health care that the Senator cited and add to that 4 million more that will be covered by Medicaid expansion in the 16 States that have refused to expand Medicaid to 138 percent of poverty, now we are talking about 24 million of an eligible population of 34 million. That is two-thirds. That is extraordinary. That has happened just in the last few years. Would the Senator from Illinois believe that?

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I want to speak about health care, and it is a health care crisis that is upon us right now. It is the Zika crisis. Happily, if my voice will hold out, I am here to share with the Senate that I think we have finally found a path forward to fund the fight against Zika. The specifics are still being worked out, but it seems that there will be a deal, and we will soon be able to move forward on doing what we tried to do last summer, which is to fund the crisis that we know as the Zika crisis. Let me just briefly describe it. Populations outside of the continental United States, such as Brazil, are highly infected populations because of the presence of this type of mosquito, the Aedes aegypti mosquito. It is not like a normal mosquito. Normal mosquitoes come out at night. They fly all around in the countryside. When this Florida boy grew up, I was bitten by so many mosquitoes I was almost immune. But this aegypti mosquito lurks in the dark corners of your house. She lays her eggs, her larva, in stagnant water--but not a pool, not a pond like normal mosquitoes; they can lay their larva in a still surface of water as small as a bottle cap that has caught water. As a result, this mosquito transmitting the virus feeds not on one person at a feeding but four people. Thus, an infected mosquito has now transmitted the virus to four people who, in turn, can now transmit it to others by sexual contact or another uninfected mosquito bites the infected person. Now that mosquito is infected and it goes go on. You see how it can expand. In Florida, there are 756 cases of the virus that we know of, and that includes 84 pregnant women. Why do I say pregnant women? Because if you get the virus, it is just like a mild flu, but if you are pregnant and you get the virus in the first trimester of pregnancy, there is a 2-percent to 11-percent chance that your baby is going to be deformed. The virus attacks the developing fetus in the brain stem and causes the brain and the head to shrink. That is what we are dealing with. When we left in the summer, early July, to some Senators it was ``out of sight, out of mind,'' but we have seen the increasing numbers of cases, thousands now nationwide, 756 in Florida alone. By the way, that is just what we know of. The CDC is estimating that there are four people walking around with the virus for every one that we know of, so you see the problem. To bring this back to politics, I can tell you that the people in Florida are very agitated. I have been there the last two weekends, and I can tell you it is the No. 1 issue on their minds. The fact that some of our Republican colleagues--particularly in the House of Representatives--are willing to put ridiculous riders on the Zika funding bill and insist on that for three votes--let me take you back. Remember, we had an overwhelming, bipartisan vote in this Senate for $1.1 billion to get at it. To do what? Local mosquito control, health care assistance, and continued research on the vaccine. We are another 1 year or 2 years away from the vaccine, but the Food and Drug Administration is ready to go with the first trial. It takes money. They have run out of money. We need to do it. The Senate recognized that. We passed it months ago, I think by 89 votes out of the 100 Senators. We sent it to the House, and the House decided to play politics. They add something to do with the Confederate flag. They add something to do with defunding Planned Parenthood. They add something that has to do with cutting Medicaid money going to Puerto Rico. Why is that particularly onerous? The CDC estimates that 25 percent of the population of Puerto Rico is infected, that a quarter of the people are infected. Of all places, an island territory with American citizens--a territory of the United States--is where we ought to be helping with health care for a very poor population. We shouldn't be cutting additional funds for Puerto Rico. Yet that is what we have been faced with. I am of a mind of new optimism now because I think common sense is beginning to break out. In this Florida situation of 756 cases, we have seen newspaper reports that the State of Florida government hasn't been transparent about the spread of the virus in our State. Over the weekend, the Miami Herald reported that ``the information issued by the governor and state agencies has not been timely or accurate--cases announced as `new' are often several weeks old, because of a time lag in diagnosis--and excludes details that public health experts say would allow people to make informed decisions and provide a complete picture of Zika's foothold in Florida.'' As we have said many times on this floor, this is not the time for political games. Those games should be over, and we should do it. The wonderful news that a deal is being struck is welcome news to this Senator. The threat that this country faces from the spread of this virus is real. The virus-carrying mosquito, the Aedes aegypti, is in the State of the Senator from Iowa--a State you wouldn't normally think of as having mosquitoes. We are in the midst of a public health crisis, and it should be treated like the emergency it is. So as we await the final details of this possible deal, it is important to remember that no one agency, State, or leader is going to solve this crisis alone. Those who saw this virus as a political opportunity are the ones who got us into this mess of delay, month after month. The virus is not a political opportunity; it is a public health emergency. To stop the spread of the virus, we are going to have to do what we did months ago--come together in a bipartisan fashion. As Congress comes together to finally act, we are going to need leaders across the country to act prudently and expeditiously to put these funds to use as quickly as possible. Members of Congress, pass the Zika bill. We need it now. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, we have a vote coming up at 5:30 on the Zika crisis. Unfortunately, it is not the vote we voted on in the bipartisan bill which there were 69 votes in favor of out of 100 Senators and which we then sent to the House. The House then added a number of political messages that don't have anything to do with Zika, such as the display of the Confederate flag. There are some people who want that displayed in certain areas. What does that have to do with Zika? There are others who definitely don't want that. Here is another one: Defund Planned Parenthood. Well, there are clearly people in the House of Representatives who want to defund Planned Parenthood, but what does that have to do with Zika, save for a lot of women who are pregnant and who suspect they might have the Zika virus and might go to a Planned Parenthood clinic? That would suggest we shouldn't defund Planned Parenthood. What about cutting back on Medicaid funding for Puerto Rico? Now, that has something to do with Zika because Puerto Rico and Brazil are the two places that are the most infected. The CDC estimates that 25 percent of the population of Puerto Rico is infected with the Zika virus. So why would we want to cut Medicaid funding for Puerto Rico? Well, that is not only ridiculous, it is silly. So once again--now multiple times--at 5:30, we will have that vote, and those who desperately want the funding to meet the emergency crisis of Zika are being asked to do so by having to take these political riders that people who are in the extreme spectrum of politics in the House of Representatives want and think they can force us to take. Well, it is not going to happen. Is there a crisis? Well, let me tell you what the latest is in my State of Florida. There are 67 non-travel-related cases of Zika that have been established. There are 577 in the State of Florida that are travel-related. What does that mean? That means that 577 people have contracted Zika someplace else and they have come to Florida. But they are there. There are 67--maybe over 70--who have contracted Zika in the State of Florida. You can contract it one of two ways. You can contract it from a mosquito that is infected. The Aedes aegypti strain of mosquito is not a normal mosquito. He lurks in the back, dark corners of the house. She can lay her eggs in stagnant water in something as little as a bottle cap. That is one way to get Zika transmitted in Florida, and there have been upwards of 70 of those cases. The other way is by sexual transmission. If one of the partners has Zika, they can transmit it to the other. The Zika virus lives in the male for about 2 months. The Zika virus itself manifests itself like a mild flu. That is not really the problem; the problem is the over 80 females in Florida who are pregnant and who also have the Zika virus. Madam President, you have seen the photos of these terribly deformed children. That is because as the fetus develops, the virus attacks the brain stem and lessens the ability of the fetus to develop a normal head and a normal size brain. As a result, we see these pictures of these terribly deformed babies. It is such a tragedy not only for the family, but it is a considerable expense. We have heard some authorities estimate that for the expected life of a child who is born with microcephaly, it may cost as much as $10 million. Where is that money going to come from? And in our State of Florida, there are over 80 females who are pregnant and who are infected with the Zika virus. I gave just the statistics of our State. We happen to be ground zero for the Zika virus. There are 12 flights a day into the Miami International Airport from Brazil and Puerto Rico. So you see the opportunity to keep bringing it in just into the State of Florida. It is elsewhere in the country as well. Some of our brethren and sistren around here--but especially in the other body, since we passed the bill here--still have their heads in the sand and are refusing to recognize that this is an emergency. If they continue, here is what is going to happen: An infected person doesn't necessarily stay in one place. They can get on an airplane or they can get on a train or in a car and go elsewhere in the country. Elsewhere in the country, if that infected person is bitten by an aegypti mosquito, now that mosquito is infected, and that mosquito feeds on an average of four people at one sitting for dinner. So now the infected mosquito has now infected four more people in another State because that person traveled to another State. It ought to be common sense. And how many times have folks like me and the Senator from Maryland come and pled with our colleagues to stop this monkey business? Let's stop these political games. Let's stop these political riders. Let's do what the Senate did 3 months ago when it passed--bipartisan--by 69 votes $1.1 billion in emergency funding and sent it to the House and asked the House to stop playing these games. So it seems to me we are going to go through another exercise, now having done so multiple times. We are going to vote this down at 5:30. What is going to happen next? I hope reasonable heads will prevail. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, today I wish to honor MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, FL, during its 75th anniversary year. MacDill's humble start began during its construction when aircrews of the 29th Bomber Group landed their B-17 Flying Fortress bombers on a nearby dirt airstrip in farmer John Drew's fields after flying antisubmarine patrols in the Gulf of Mexico. Later named Drew Field, this strip is now known as Tampa International Airport. Formally dedicated on April 16, 1941, MacDill was primarily known for training bomber aircrews of the III Bomber Command. Intrepid but inexperienced crews learning to fly B-26 Marauder bombers at MacDill were glad of Tampa's warm climate when ditching their aircraft in the waters surrounding the field. The regularity of this occurrence prompted air crews to jokingly coin the phrase ``Once a day in Tampa Bay.'' MacDill proved its strategic significance during World War II as an antisubmarine patrol and air defense base home to B-24A Liberators of the 44th Bomber Group and Seversky P-35 aircraft of the 53rd Pursuit Group. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, MacDill again displayed its geographical importance, serving as a prime location for staging B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft. Transitioning from a primarily bomber base once home to the famed B- 17 Memphis Belle, MacDill became a Tactical Air Command installation flying the F-84 Thunderstreak jet fighter. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, F-4 Phantom II fighters filled its skies, followed by F-16 Fighting Falcons in the 1980s and 1990s. The base is now an Air Mobility Command installation, home to the 6th Air Mobility Wing and its 310th Airlift Squadron and the 91st Air Refueling Squadron. MacDill is also home to the headquarters of two of the U.S. military's unified combatant commands: U.S. Central Command, whose area of operations encompasses the Middle East and parts of North Africa and Central Asia, and U.S. Special Operations Command, tasked with oversight of the component special operations units of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Non-Department of Defense tenants of MacDill Air Force Base include the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Aircraft Operations Center, which operates the NOAA ``Hurricane Hunter'' fleet of WP-3D Orion and Gulfstream V aircraft. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also conducts its antimedfly operations out of MacDill. More than 13,000 military and civilian personnel are involved in operations at MacDill, and the surrounding community is home to approximately 170,000 retirees who use health and welfare services on the base. MacDill is a vital economic driver for the Tampa Bay area and is not only a source of jobs for the community, but also a welcome source of pride in our Nation's Armed Forces. I am confident that MacDill Air Force Base will remain an important strategic installation for our military and continue to play an important role in protecting the safety of Floridians and all Americans. I am proud to honor its 75 great years of service. (At the request of Mr. Reid, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Warren Ponto, the committee's detailee from the FAA, be allowed privileges of the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President at 1:45 p.m. today, we are going to vote on the FAA bill. It is coming back, in essence, as a conference report, although it was negotiated directly with the House. So we will take up the House message. I thank Senator Thune, the chairman of the committee, because the two of us, of course, get along, and we have worked together to achieve an agreement with our counterparts in the House. So I thank Senator Thune. There were parts of this bill that he basically said for me to work them out with the Republican chairman in the House, and the work product is the proof in the pudding that we are going to take up today. This is a little more than a 14-month extension, but don't let that fool you because it is going to put into permanent law bolstering security at our airports in order to help better protect us. Of course, in these times, the safety of our traveling public is a top priority. In fact, it contains some of the most significant aviation security reforms that Congress has ever considered, and we have considered, as the Presiding Officer can remember, a lot since September 11, 2001. It also contains a number of consumer protection and drone safety provisions. So let me just enumerate a couple of those. To address the insider threat posed by terrorists, we increase the vetting requirements and random physical screenings of airport employees. What we found was, especially with the Atlanta airport situation 2 years ago, that they were not really checking their airport employees. There was a gunrunning scheme over a 3-month period in which an Atlanta airport employee would bring in guns. He wasn't checked, he wasn't screened, and they didn't know what was in his backpack. Then he would go into the sterile TSA area where passengers are, into the men's room, and he would trade his backpack to a passenger that had already come through TSA screening. For 3 months they carried on this scheme of running guns from Atlanta to New York. Thank goodness, they weren't terrorists. They were criminals. But we can imagine that something like 150 guns were transported over that 3- month period. Well, that is what we addressed in this FAA bill. We have increased the screening required at the airports, even though that is their responsibility. The most effective thing for TSA in screening anybody or baggage is the nose of a dog. We have doubled VIPR dog teams, and that is a substantive change. What about the international flights? We are always concerned about the point of last departure in an international designation coming into the United States. Have they been sufficiently checked, since we in effect are relying on the host government of that airport for a U.S.- inbound flight? This will authorize TSA to donate unneeded security equipment to foreign airports with service to the United States. We are calling for increased cooperation between us and partner nations on routes flown by Americans. We are now in this bill requiring a new assessment of foreign cargo security programs. We also are setting up new screening systems and security checkpoint configurations to try to expedite passengers getting through. But at the same time, recognizing what happened in the terrorist attacks in Belgium and Istanbul makes it clear that we have to reduce the vulnerability of all those passengers amassing as a soft target before they ever go through the TSA checkpoint. That is what they did in Istanbul and in Belgium. So we put stuff to address that in this bill. Now, as to cyber security, we have heard a lot about it. Certainly, the cyber security risk for the FAA is a definite one, and we have done stuff in this bill to reduce the cyber security risk to the national airspace system and civil aviation. That includes reducing the vulnerability of the in-flight entertainment systems. We have all seen that video where someone with a laptop can take over a car through the in-car entertainment systems. We are concerned about that with regard to airlines, airplanes as well. This legislation supports the FAA efforts to develop a threat model to strengthen against that cyber security threat. What about consumers? This is substantive law that will last far beyond the extension of this bill that extends the FAA authorization through September 30 of next year. Don't you get irritated when you pay a baggage fee? Say you pay 50 bucks for an extra bag or a heavy bag and all of a sudden it is lost or significantly delayed? In this bill, those baggage fees are going to be returned. We are also going to require the airlines to have policies that are family-friendly. What about the child who desperately needs to sit next to a parent? Save for the goodness of the passengers--and the passengers usually respond because they are good people and realize that a child ought to sit close to a parent. We have enshrined that in this bill, and that will become a permanent law. For air travel with people with disabilities, we call for a review of the training and practices by airports and airlines and require the Department of Transportation to accelerate the rulemaking. Finally, I want to talk about the potential--and it is an accident waiting to happen--of an unmanned aerial vehicle--in other words, a drone--colliding with an airliner. We had a report a few months ago about an inbound American Airlines flight into Miami. They sighted a drone off the left wing. It is absolutely essential that we keep drones out of the airspace for takeoffs and landings in a busy airfield, so we have set up in the legislation a pilot program to develop and test technologies to intercept that drone or to shut it down when it is near an airport in order that we don't have what we know would be a catastrophic crash. It requires the FAA to work with NASA to test and develop a drone traffic management system. I thank all of our Senate colleagues. I thank the ranking member and the chairman in the House, as we negotiated these provisions in this bill. That is what we are going to vote on at 1:45 p.m. I commend the FAA bill, and I hope the Senate considers it favorably. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, that is true.

Mr. NELSON. For 15\1/2\ years, that is true.

Mr. NELSON. Not only the good fortune but the great privilege, and now I have the opportunity to work on the policy for the Nation's space program.

Mr. NELSON. The good Lord willing, I know it pretty much like the back of my hand.

Mr. NELSON. Yes, sir. And I know that mosquitoes are all over Florida, but now this one strain of mosquito, the aegypti, for dinner feeds not on one human but on four. If the mosquito has the Zika virus, each of those four would then be infected with the virus after the mosquito has had its dinner.

Mr. NELSON. If you think of the building of the Panama Canal, mosquitoes transmitted malaria. So mosquitoes are a vector which transmits a lot of diseases. This strain of mosquito can lay its larvae in stagnant water contained in something as small as a bottle cap.

Mr. NELSON. That is correct, and we usually meet those emergencies with emergency funding.

Mr. NELSON. There is a direct link, I would say, Mr. President, in response to the Senator, between a pregnant woman being infected with the Zika virus and the probability that she will deliver a child who is deformed.

Mr. NELSON. Not only that, but with bipartisan support early on in this whole dialogue. And now we are seeing the resistance of the majority leader to take up the very bill that passed with those overwhelming numbers of bipartisan support.

Mr. NELSON. Amen to that, and here we are dithering with these political games. We wonder why the American public is so turned off when they see what is going on up here, and here is one of the very best examples of an emergency.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I come to the floor for the purpose of making a unanimous consent request with regard to Zika. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 5243, which is at the desk; that all after the enacting clause be stricken; that the substitute amendment, which is the text of the Blunt-Murray amendment to provide $1.1 billion of funding for Zika, be agreed to; that there be up to 1 hour of debate equally divided between the two leaders or their designees; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and the Senate vote on passage of the bill, as amended, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, reserving the right to object--first of all, did I hear an objection from the majority leader to my unanimous consent request?