Marco Rubio

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I came to the floor a few weeks ago to bring to people's attention an abuse that is occurring in our welfare system, and it involves Cuban immigration. Let me describe the situation we face today. If an immigrant comes to the United States from Cuba legally, entering the United States from another country--let me rephrase that. If an immigrant legally enters the United States from any country in the world, except for Cuba or Haiti, they cannot immediately receive Federal benefits. If you are a legal immigrant and came to the United States from Venezuela, Mexico, or Japan--you did your paperwork and paid your fees--you do not qualify for any Federal benefits for the first 5 years you are in this country. However, there is an exception for people who come from Cuba. Under the Cuban Adjustment Act, anyone who comes from Cuba legally or illegally-- if you cross the border and say ``I am a Cuban''--you are immediately accepted into the United States legally. I am not here today to talk about changing that status, even though there is a significant migratory crisis that is building, and I do think that issue needs to be reexamined. Here is the exception to the law: If you come to the United States from Cuba, whether you entered across the border or entered on a visa, you are one of the only immigrants in America who immediately and automatically qualifies for Federal benefits. You don't have to prove you are a refugee or prove you are fleeing oppression. You don't have to prove anything. You are automatically assumed to be a political refugee and given not just status in the United States but a series of public benefits. For decades this has been because U.S. law made the presumption that if you were leaving Cuba to come to the United States, you were obviously a refugee. I believe for a lot of people who are still coming that is true because they are fleeing a horrible and oppressive regime and have had nowhere else to go because in many cases they fear for their lives in Cuba. For some time now, there has been growing doubt about whether all of the people who are now coming from Cuba are, in fact, fleeing oppression. Or are they increasingly becoming more like an economic refugee? From what we see in South Florida with our own eyes and also because of the investigative reporting by the South Florida SunSentinel, we know there are growing abuses to this benefit. The reason is that many people who are coming from Cuba, supposedly as refugees seeking to flee oppression, are now traveling back to Cuba 15, 20, or 30 times a year. That raises an alarm right away. If you are entering the United States and immediately and automatically given status as refugees--in addition, you are being given access to a full portfolio of Federal benefits--because you are supposedly fleeing oppression, but then traveling back to Cuba 15, 20, or 30 times a year in many cases, it causes us to have a serious doubt about whether everyone who is coming here from Cuba should be considered a refugee for purposes of benefits, but today they are. Even at this very moment, we are seeing a historic increase in the number of people who are originally from Cuba crossing the Mexican-U.S. border. We have seen an increase in the number of rafters. Last week there was a standoff between the Coast Guard and some Cuban migrants who went up to a lighthouse and wouldn't come down because they wanted to get the status under the wet-foot, dry-foot policy. I think we can debate that issue. I am not here today to propose changes to the status, but I do think we have to ask ourselves: What about the Federal benefits? What about the benefits they are collecting which are specifically and exclusively intended for refugees and refugees only? Obviously, if you are traveling back to Cuba over and over again, you are not a refugee and therefore should not be eligible for these benefits. The abuses we have now seen are extensive. The stories of people who are actually living in Cuba--they are living in Cuba but collecting government benefits in America, and their family is wiring the money to them. There are people who are collecting an assortment of benefits from housing to cash, and that money is being sent to them while they live in Cuba for months and sometimes years at a time. It is an outrage. It is an abuse. By the way, I am of Cuban descent and live in a community with a large number of Cuban exiles and migrants. Our own people in South Florida are saying that this is an outrage. They see this abuse. It is their taxpayer money, and they want something done about it. Today we learned from the Congressional Budget Office, which analyzes these issues in-depth and determines how much they actually cost taxpayers, that the long-term cost of this abuse over the course of the next 10 years will be approximately $2.5 billion to the American taxpayer. A significant percentage of that $2.5 billion is going to people who aren't even living in the United States. We know from investigations that the money often ends up back in Cuba. We have seen people abuse the system over and over again by having a relative in the United States who goes to the bank every month, takes a cut, and sends the rest of the money to them. That is your money that is being sent to them. The American people are a generous people, but right now those who abuse the system are taking American taxpayers for fools, and we need to stop it. That is why I am hopeful that today's report from the Congressional Budget Office will give us renewed momentum to end this problem and reform the system. The way to do it is by passing a law I have introduced with Congressman Carlos Curbelo in the House that ends the automatic assumption in U.S. law that assumes all Cuban immigrants are refugees. It says that in order to receive refugee benefits, they have to prove they are refugees or legitimately fearing for their lives if they were to return to Cuba. This is how the process works: If you cross the U.S.-Mexico border and you are from Cuba or arrive on a raft, you will get your status and will be legal in this country, but you will have to prove you are actually coming because you fear persecution before you automatically qualify for refugee benefits. In essence, all I am asking is that people prove they are political refugees before they qualify for Federal benefits that are available only to political refugees. Lest anyone think this is some sort of partisan trick, this is a bipartisan measure that my Democratic colleague, the senior Senator from Florida, supports. It has over 50 bipartisan cosponsors in the House, including the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I hope we can get this done, even if the best way to do it is on its own merits with a straight up-or-down vote or as an amendment included in a larger bill. With all the talk about paying for Zika virus funding, maybe this is one of the ways we can pay for some of that, but let's get it done. Mr. President, $2.5 billion is still real taxpayer money, a significant percentage of which is being misspent on a loophole that exists in the law that most people don't even know is there. I truly hope we can address it. It makes all the sense in the world. Everyone is asking for it. There is no good-faith or reasonable reason to oppose it, and it is my hope we can address it before this Congress adjourns at the end of this year, or sooner if possible, and that we can put an end to these abuses once and for all. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. RUBIO

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

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, a poll last month found that 4 in 10 Americans had heard little or nothing about the Zika virus, and many others were unaware that it was a risk to the United States. The likely reason for this is that the virus isn't yet being transmitted locally here in the United States. But for all of us in Congress, this is not an excuse for inaction. Our job is to anticipate threats, not just to respond to them. We have all the information we need to know that the Zika virus is bad and is potentially about to get worse. In fact, I believe it won't be long before virtually all of our people have heard of this virus, are concerned about it, and want to know why their leaders aren't doing more to fight it. They want to know what we are doing now. Sadly, the answer is not enough. Even though the problem has been steadily getting worse, Congress has refused to treat it with the urgency I believe it deserves. There was a time when Zika was considered a foreign virus, but that is no longer the case. As of today, there are now 544 cases in the mainland United States, with more being confirmed almost daily. All of those so far are travel related, but there are also 832 cases locally transmitted in American territories, mostly in Puerto Rico. If the problem is there, it won't be long before it is here on the mainland. Just this week, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is the government's top authority on these issues, warned that mosquitoes carrying Zika will begin infecting Americans in the next ``month or so.'' Once those mosquitoes are here, they are going to reproduce. As soon as we have one case of Zika transmitted locally by a mosquito, there will be others that will follow shortly thereafter. Just a few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control announced that 157 pregnant women in the United States and another 122 in U.S. territories have shown signs of infection from the Zika virus. This should be another wake-up call for the Congress. Knowing that there are at least 279 pregnant women in the United States with likely Zika virus infections means we also potentially have at least 279 unborn children at risk of microcephaly, and we should be doing all we can to save these human beings. So we have a limited amount of time to brace ourselves and get a headstart on confronting this threat. Keep in mind that there is not yet a vaccine for Zika. There is no cure for the conditions and for the birth defects it causes. So for all of us as Americans but especially for all of us as elected leaders, it is long past due to take this virus seriously, because the virus is not just serious; this virus is deadly serious, and so far the Congress is failing this test. I am proud of the work done here in the Senate to pass a funding measure. It may not have been as much as we may ultimately need, but at least at $1.1 billion, a significant amount of money is going to go toward fighting this threat. To date, in the House, the story is different. Last week, the House passed a $622 million package. This is about a third of what was originally requested. The funds were secured by redirecting money approved to respond to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. I want to be wrong about this, but I fear that $622 million is simply not going to be enough to deal with this problem if it heads in the direction that the doctors and the experts are telling us it is headed. So I come here on the floor of the Senate today to urge our colleagues in the House and its leadership to realize that this threat is knocking on our door and the opportunity to get out ahead of this problem is quickly slipping away. Within a month, we are likely to have a very different situation on our hands with regards to Zika. Not only have we delayed action for far too long already, but we are not expecting any action this week before Congress goes into recess next week. In other words, it is likely Congress will let at least--at least--another 2 weeks go by on this issue without any action. So I urge the American people to make next week a tough one on those who are home from Congress who have refused to take meaningful action to confront Zika because they need to hear from you. To any Members of Congress who don't receive pressure at home next week, you should know that you soon enough will. While only a portion of our constituents are currently concerned about Zika, that will change the moment the first case locally transmitted by a mosquito is confirmed in the mainland United States. Then we are going to have to answer to those who want to know why we didn't act, and, quite frankly, we are not going to have a satisfying answer. Waiting to act until we have a panic on our hands is not leadership. So I encourage the House to act on the scale the American people need it to act, and I urge Congress to send a bill to the President as soon as possible regarding this matter. I hope we will properly fund this fight so we can win it. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. RUBIO

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

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, there is an ongoing debate in our politics today about the value of leadership around the world in the 21st century. There is a view that seems to be gaining traction and favor--that our international engagement is one-sided, that our allies are free riders, that we contribute too much and get too little in return, and so why should we be involved in the world? These voices exist in both parties, and I would like to answer them today. I want to start by looking back at the last century, when the world emerged from the death and destruction of the Second World War. The United States could have decided after that war to wall ourselves off-- that after the loss of so many of our best and brightest, we had already paid enough for peace. Instead, our country became the driving force behind international order. We forged a series of strong alliances, led with moral clarity, and positioned our military strength strategically around the world. In doing so, the American people benefitted immensely as we helped to stave off the threat of another global conflict and oversaw decades of economic growth and the spread of democracy and freedom around the world. Then, like now, our people benefitted tremendously from our status in the world, even though our engagement was disproportional to that of other nations; in fact, we benefitted precisely because our engagement was disproportional to that of other nations. International engagement has never been a business deal. International engagement is not a transaction in which we give something tangible and receive something tangible in return. America has more to give to the nations we are helping, and that is one of the reasons why we have a responsibility to lead. It is written in the Bible: ``From everyone who has been given much, much will be required.'' But our leadership ends up paying dividends for the entire world, and especially for the American people. First of all, American workers and families benefit economically. International affairs have a bigger impact on the financial well-being of our people today than ever before. In our global economy, someone on the other side of the planet can now buy a product from an American with the tap of a finger. But when nations or entire regions are torn apart by war and by oppression, they become closed off, and economic growth in our own country is restricted as a result. If America were to fail to protect the openness of international waters, global shipping would be threatened and prices would rise for consumers on virtually everything. Similarly, if space and cyber space became threatened or restricted, global communications and commerce would suffer as well. Americans also see real benefits in terms of our safety at home and around the world. Without American leadership, regional order tends to break down, and then instability spreads. This opens up vacuums that are filled up by radicals, and those radicals always--irrespective of what we are doing or what we are not doing--target America, and they do so either to bolster their own prestige or for ideological reasons or often for both. As President Obama has found, leaving the Middle East doesn't mean terrorists stop trying to kill Americans. Our families, our homeland, and our men and women in uniform are less safe when America disengages from the world. We also benefit geopolitically when we help other nations. Think what Europe would look like if it had not been for America's moral and strategic leadership during the Cold War. Europe still faces many challenges today, mainly because of our neglect of the crisis in Syria, but for centuries prior, Europe was driven by conflict. European peace was thought to be impossible. Yet that is what NATO and other institutions have helped achieve with American support. What would Asia look like right now had the United States not helped it to rebuild after the Second World War. Look at the way that American leadership allowed South Korea to go from a poor country--a dictatorship--to a vibrant democracy and one of the largest economies in the world. South Korea is now a net donor to foreign aid and a crucial ally for us in a region that includes an aggressive China and a belligerent North Korea. Japan has gone from a country devastated by war and not trusted by its neighbors to one of the most peaceful societies in the world. It has also become a net contributor to global security through its military and humanitarian assistance programs. Then there is the Middle East. Whether we should continue to play a role there is a question that weighs particularly heavily on the minds of many Americans. I understand the doubts and frustrations. We have been involved in the region for decades. Nothing seems to be getting better, and despite our attempts to help, we watch on television as some celebrate our tragedies and burn our flag in the Arab streets. It is true that we cannot solve all of the region's problems, but we have an interest in what happens there, nonetheless. That interest is served by our involvement, not by our withdrawal. ISIS arose, in the first place, because of the political instability that exists in both Syria and Iraq, and that instability was created in part because President Obama withdrew or withheld American leadership at crucial moments. Failing to lead costs us more in the long-term than it saves us in the short-term, and we will continue to pay a steep price each time we fail to lead in the future. There are complex considerations to make regarding our engagement in every region, but I believe a world without sustained American engagement is not a world any of us want to live in. This idea shared by prominent voices in both parties--that America is such a weak nation that we cannot afford to be engaged in the world--is one of the biggest lies ever told to the American people. Just because our government leaders are weak does not mean America is weak. No American wants to live in a world where Vladimir Putin sets the agenda or ISIS holds us hostage to their demands. Yet this is the world we are heading toward as political leaders continue to embrace America's decline. Defense spending is currently at roughly 3.3 percent of our budget, compared to 14 percent at the height of the Korean war. Our Army is on track to be at pre-World War II levels. Our Navy is already at pre- World War I levels, and our Air Force has the smallest and oldest combat force in its history. These are the results of specific policy choices made by politicians right here. It is no accident that the result has been more conflict around the world and less American influence. I saw firsthand on a recent trip to Iraq how our men and women in uniform around the world are doing their best to keep us safe with limited resources. We put them in an untenable position. They are asked to maintain our global commitments, fight ISIS and other terrorist groups, and deter countries such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. They and our country deserve better. ``Spend less abroad so we can spend more at home'' has become a common refrain among leaders in both parties. It is used to excuse cuts to the military and our presence around the world. The truth is that the defense budget is not the primary driver of our debt. It is our entitlement programs. Every time we try to cut a dollar from our military, it seems to cost us several more just to make up for it. In addition to investing in our strength, we must apply that strength in a way that respects our values and supports our economic interests. Americans deserve a foreign policy we can be proud of. But for the last 8 years, we have had a Commander in Chief who praises and appeases dictators to promote the illusion of peace. Some in my party have now adopted a similar approach. They may claim to represent different ideas, but both emanate from the same notion--that Americans are too tired, that America is too weak, and that we are too much like the rest of the world to stand up to tyrants, so we should just cut deals with them instead. This is not only morally wrong, but it is contrary to our interests. Whenever our foreign policy becomes unhinged from its moral purpose, it weakens global stability and it forms cracks in our national resolve. But whenever freedom and human rights spread, partners for our Nation are born. We must restore America's willingness to state boldly what we stand for and why. Just as Reagan never flinched in his criticisms of the Soviet Union, we must not shy away from demanding that China allow true freedom for its 1.3 billion people or boldly stating that Vladimir Putin is a corrupt thug. Nor should we hesitate in calling the source of atrocities in the Middle East by its real name--radical Islam. We should always stand with Israel, and we should not abandon the cause of freedom in our own hemisphere and allow cruel and immoral dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela to be absolved of their crimes. The world needs America's moral and military strength just as much as our people and our economy do. No other nation can deter global conflict by its presence alone. No other nation can offer the security and benevolence that America can. No other Nation can be trusted to defend peace and advance liberty. America cannot avoid its role as a global leader. But we also know America cannot be tasked with protecting the world on its own. It will take an international order of free nations with free economies to do so. We must work with like-minded allies whenever possible and encourage them to do their part, but no other nation has the ability to organize or lead such a coalition if we fail to do so. That is why I will continue to make the case for an engaged America, no matter who becomes our next President, no matter how the political winds may blow. Our safety and our prosperity depend on it. The ideal of America depends on it. That was true last century, and it is even more so today. Madam President, with that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING Officer. The clerk will call the roll.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I wish to talk about housing issues contained in the bill we are debating, and I want to talk specifically about a project in Florida that we became aware of in October. It is named Eureka Gardens. It is a low-income, affordable housing project that uses Section 8 funds to house people of lower income, as you are all aware of that program. It is run and owned by an organization called Global Ministries Foundation. It is run by a reverend, Richard Hamlet. It is organized as a 501(c)(3), the organization that owns this building. Mr. Hamlet, Reverend Hamlet, is the head of the organization. If you look at the Web site for Global Ministries, there is a link that says: ``What We Do.'' If you go to that section of the Global Ministries Foundation Web site, this is what it says they do: ``Providing affordable housing across the United States and ministering to the physical, spiritual and emotional needs of our residents.'' That is what they state as their business purpose. I imagine that is what they needed to state because of their 501(c)(3) not-for-profit status. However, we have a quote from Reverend Hamlet, who has said that his involvement in housing is purely business-related. He said: This is a business. This isn't a church mission. These are business corporations that we set up, but we're no different from a real estate investment trust or a private equity group. That is how he described his 501(c)(3), not-for-profit Global Ministries Foundation. Global Ministries has over 40 properties in multiple States--Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, New York, Tennessee, and Georgia. In all of these States, in all of these properties, they have over 5,000 units that qualify as assisted. In 19 locations across Florida, they have over 2,000 assisted units. This particular project in Jacksonville, FL, Eureka Gardens, has 396 assisted units. This is the problem we found with some of these properties. In Eureka Gardens, in the last year, the property was found to be in horrifying condition. I have spoken of it on the floor before. I am talking about people living in a place where there was mold on the walls, where the appliances were 15 years old, where the apartments hadn't been painted in 13 years, where windows didn't open, where staircases were literally falling down, and where the city had to come in, evacuate people, and condemn the property. Those were the conditions in Eureka Gardens. We got involved last October to get those remedied. So there was the thinking, well, maybe this is just one property. Maybe Global Ministries only has one property that is run this way but generally they are a good actor. This is what we found: They have two properties--Warren and Tulane Apartments in Memphis, TN--that have such poor living companies as well that HUD pulled their Federal funding from the housing. In Atlanta, we found that their Forest Cove property has been plagued by rodents and sewage. This is what news crews reported about their property in Atlanta. It said ``building, siding, and ceiling tiles peeling from many of the buildings. . . . Garbage and stagnant green water were feet from playing children.'' At Forest Cove, this is what a tenant said to news reporters: I'm homeless right now. I moved out to be homeless. Because the conditions were so bad, the guy moved out of the property. In other words, he would rather be homeless than live in a Global Ministries Foundation property. So we have two properties in Memphis, TN, we have a property in Atlanta, and then there is another property in Jacksonville that they own. The property is called Washington Heights. It also has been noted for violation. HUD's most recent review resulted in the property barely passing Federal inspections. And I will have more to say about Federal inspections in a moment. At the Goodwill Village property in Memphis, one resident said that he thought the issue was snakes on the property--snakes on the property. He thought they were being caused because they were coming to ``eat the rats.'' At Goodwill Village, the same property, a resident had an issue with a gas leak. The resident's home had the sink torn out, her stove and hot water disconnected, and a hole put into her wall. Two months after all of that, no one had come by to fix it. In Orlando, at the Windsor Cove Apartments owned by the Global Ministries Foundation, reporters saw holes in the walls where roaches and rodents came into the apartment. The same woman has a gap between her bathtub and the wall that lets water leak into the apartment below. After issues with his properties were exposed, here is what Reverend Hamlet said: ``No one should have to live under these conditions.'' They are your properties. It is not just one property; there are multiple properties across multiple States. I want to focus specifically on the one I visited last week in Jacksonville. It was an amazing experience. Forty-eight hours before we announce we are coming, nothing--literally nothing--is happening at this property. When we announce we are coming to visit the property, suddenly a bunch of contractors show up. They put up a banner welcoming the residents to all the great stuff they do there. Suddenly work crews are walking all over, fixing the place up. All of a sudden, because we are coming to visit, all these work crews mysteriously show up. Eureka Gardens's problems have been going on for a long time, but they only became known in October of last year when a local television station and other local media began to highlight them. My Jacksonville office staff toured Eureka Gardens in early 2015 and in October of 2015. I want to report what they found in that one building. As I said, we have now had reports about other buildings with similar conditions run by this Global Ministries 501(c)(3), but I want to share what my staff found when they visited Eureka Gardens. They saw crumbling stairs disguised with duct tape and covered with apparent black mold. When I am talking about the stairs, I mean the stairs that connect the first floor of the building with the second floor of the building, these metal stairs. They would just put duct tape over the areas where the stairs and the wall were cracking and almost falling. They just put duct tape on it. There was mold on these stairs; they spray-painted over it. My staff found faulty electrical wiring. Do you know what they did with the faulty electrical wiring? They covered it up with a garbage bag so no one could see it. They could smell the natural gas odor being sucked from an outdoor piping system into the air-conditioning units of residents, and they found all sorts of other health and safety issues. At Eureka Gardens, when residents were asked about housing, one resident said, ``Dogs live better than this.'' In fact, there was a 4- year-old living in Eureka Gardens who was suffering from lead poisoning, which her mother has a right to believe she got in her Eureka Gardens apartment--an apartment, by the way, paid for with your taxpayer money. Section 8 housing is Federal taxpayer money going into the hands of these slumlords, and a child now has lead poisoning because of it. In December of last year, HUD declared Eureka Gardens to be in default of the contract, and it set a February 24, 2016, deadline to meet requirements. In February, Eureka Gardens passed this inspection, but by March HUD had written to Eureka Gardens saying the Department ``does not believe the property would currently pass another REAC inspection.'' Last Friday I visited Eureka Gardens. I saw, for example, an apartment where the window did not open. I saw an apartment where the window did not open. The window had been cracked, and do you know how they fixed it? Somebody came and put a glob of glue where the window connects next to the pane, and if you tried to open the window, it wouldn't go up. That means if there was a fire in that house, the person sleeping in that room would not be able to get out of that window unless they break it. I saw that with my own eyes last week when I was there. I saw an apartment that hadn't been painted in 13 years. I saw a stove where the knobs were unrecognizable because they were covered with glue, basically, and grime. I saw a refrigerator that looked like it was from North Korea. It had to be 15 years old. There was all sorts of rust on the side and they just spray-painted over the rust. As I said earlier, 48 hours before I visited, Global Ministries started to fix some of these cosmetic issues. By the way, that included putting up a piece of wood with exposed nails and calling it a door. This apartment has two exits--in the front and in the back. This lady gets home from work and she opens her back door. They have boarded up the door, and there are nails sticking through the wood. She has little children. The nails were the kind that if you ran into that door because you didn't know it was there, you would get a nail to the face, to the heart, to the gut. So you would ask yourself, all right, you have these owners of all these units and they are getting this Federal money under this HUD contract. Where does all the money go? What are they doing with all this money they make? Well, you can look at their 990 tax forms, which are available for all 501(c)(3) organizations. Let me tell you about the 2014 tax year, which is the most recent one that is available. In the year 2014, the Reverend Richard Hamlet paid himself $495,000 plus $40,000 in nontaxable benefits. Also in 2014, the Reverend Hamlet's family members were paid an additional $218,000. By the way, he had previously failed to disclose his family members' compensation on tax forms, which is in violation of IRS rules that require CEOs to disclose the compensation of all family members who work for an organization. The IRS reports also show that between 2011 and 2013, Global Ministries Foundation--the landlord that owns all of these units in all of these buildings that your taxpayer money is paying for--shifted $9 million away from its low-income housing not-for-profit to its religious affiliate. There is no one here who is a more strident proponent of private and public partnerships, of faith-based initiatives, but you have these building that are crumbling. You have these people living in these deplorable conditions. In addition to paying himself half a million dollars and his family another $218,000, they took $9 million, and instead of using it to fix these units, they transferred it to the other entity they had for religious purposes. They don't seem to want to spend the money--including the taxpayer money--on making repairs, on making sure places like Eureka Gardens are liveable. Let me tell what you they do spend their money on. They spend their money on public relations specialists, because last week when I visited Eureka Gardens, they had a public relations firm on the premises counterspinning me with the media, saying things like: Oh, well, where has Rubio been all this time? Well, this became available in October, and since October we have been involved in it. So they have the money to hire a law firm. They have the money to hire a lobbying firm. They have the money to hire a public relations firm. They have the money to transfer $9 million from the not-for- profit sector into their religious uses. They have the money to pay themselves half a million dollars per year, plus $40,000 in nontaxable benefits, plus $200,000 for family members, but they don't have the money to fix these units--and not just in Florida but all across this country. Let me tell you what this behavior is. Let me tell you what Global Ministries Foundation is. It is a slumlord. They are slumlords. There are people who are living in these deplorable conditions while your taxpayer money is going into their bank account, and they are laughing at us. By the way, the other day, this minister--he has now put these properties up for sale. He told the press: This is such a profitable business. We have so many bidders who want these properties. Well, No. 1, if it is such a profitable business, why are you organized as a 501(c)(3)? And No. 2, where is all the money? Where are all the profits? Why aren't they being invested? I am all in favor of faith-based organizations being involved in the public and civic life of this country, but as an organization that was organized on the principles of caring for others, this is not caring for people. This, my friends, is the stealing of American taxpayer money, subjecting people to slum-like conditions, pocketing the money, living off the money, and transferring the money. For the life of me, I don't know how they passed any inspections. I am not a building inspector. You don't have to be one to visit this building and know there is no inspection that building should ever pass. I would just say that this is the most outrageous behavior I have seen in public housing, and now I am hearing that the same conditions exist in Orlando and in other buildings in Jacksonville. We know they exist in Memphis. In fact, they just lost their HUD contract in Memphis. A judge just issued a ruling against them yesterday on another issue in Memphis, TN. As a result of these conditions and other issues, I have filed four amendments I wish to briefly talk about. The first is amendment No. 3918, which passed. What it does is it shortens the required response time for contract violations from 30 days to 15 days. Within the 30 days that they found that gas leak at Eureka Gardens, four people at Eureka Gardens were hospitalized due to gas leaks. So I am glad shortening the timeframe will be a part of it. Another amendment we passed is one that basically asks HUD to determine the state of the assessments. Even the Secretary himself has told me it is time to revisit these assessments. If you look at this property, there is no way it should have ever passed any inspections. We need to fix the inspection process in HUD because there is no reason a property like this should pass any inspection. The third amendment I filed, and that I hope we can pass, would give State and local governments more say when HUD renews contracts for owners who have violated previous contracts. In essence, the amendment would allow the Secretary to refuse to withdraw a notice of default if the Governor of the requisite State petitions HUD to do that. Currently, the only trigger for the Secretary to withdraw a notice is a REAC score of 60 or above. If this amendment became law, if the property passed the inspection but the Governor of the State in which the property is located requests the Secretary to overturn the result, the Secretary would have the power to do so. This impacts Eureka Gardens and these other places because flawed inspections led HUD to recertify properties that are not up to standard. The Jacksonville City Council has been engaged and Mayor Curry of Jacksonville is supporting this amendment. It would grant them the ability to seek the Governor's support in having a say over the properties. The last amendment I filed is Rubio amendment No. 3986, and it is to make temporary relocation assistance available for residents in situations such as those I have just described. This amendment would make tenant protection vouchers available for tenants living in units where the owner has been declared in default of a HUD Housing Assistance Payments contract due to physical deficiencies, allowing the Secretary to consider granting tenant relocation vouchers sooner in the process. The lack of temporary relocation assistance has kept these tenants trapped in Eureka Gardens. The inability to temporarily relocate resulted in tenants being hospitalized because of gas leaks and other difficult conditions. For example, a man had to sleep in his bathtub for a week at Eureka Gardens, and tenants could not cook because the heat was shut off for days at a time. One of the things we hear from HUD is: Well, we can take away the contract, but then what happens to all these people? We don't want to do that, and slumlords like Reverend Hamlet and his group know they can get away with this as a result. There is probably more to be done. I said publicly that I think the Justice Department should look into these people. I think the Justice Department should look into places such as this. I think the IRS should examine their tax status. I think people like this should never again be allowed to have a single HUD contract anywhere in America. This is unacceptable, and it is happening right under our noses. Today it is Eureka Gardens, but I mentioned all those other States. In fact, I encourage my colleagues who live in the States of Alabama, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, New York, and Georgia to look into the properties that Global Ministries Foundation operates in your States. If the trends continue, if the trends hold up, then I almost guarantee you are going to find slumlike conditions in your State the way they were found in my State and the way they were found in Tennessee. I hope I can earn my colleagues' support in bringing these reforms as a part of the bill before us today. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, first of all, let me begin by saying how encouraged I am that we are finally seeing some action here in Congress dealing with the Zika virus. Today, we have not one but three separate proposals to deal with this which are going to come up for a vote. I support fully funding the request made. People say the President's request. Fine, it came from the White House. But it is really the scientists' request, the doctors' request, and the public health sector's request for how to address this issue. The fundamental point I make is twofold. We can pay for it. We can find $1.9 billion. By the way, we can always come back later and find it, too, although I know that is hard to see happening here in Washington. But this is a public health emergency that cannot wait for this extended debate on this issue, especially when you talk about an $18 trillion debt. Zika funding is not the reason why we have an $18 trillion debt. It is not the national driver of our debt. That is why dealing with the long-term security of Medicare and Social Security is so critical. But we can pay for $1.9 billion, and we should. But it is public health experts who have said the amount we need is $1.9 billion. I continue to urge my colleagues to take this with the sense of urgency that the public health experts have. The people I have met with, the people I have interacted with, and the people I have been talking to are not political people. I haven't been talking to people in the White House political office. I have been meeting with people who work at the Centers for Disease Control. I have been meeting with people who work at the Florida Department of Health. I have been talking to department of health officials in Puerto Rico. I have been talking with doctors who are in the frontline of dealing with microcephaly and what it means long term for the children who have been impacted by it. That is with whom I have been talking. They have outlined the kinds of things we need to be doing. But more importantly, what they outlined is that there is so much we still don't know about Zika. For example, we don't know what the long-term consequences are of a mother who is infected with Zika while pregnant and the child was born without microcephaly. We don't know what happens in 6 months, 9 months, 1 year, or 5 years down the road. But I do know that many medical experts believe there will be further manifestations of the disease's impact on the central nervous system in many of these children years after this debate in Congress is finished. I do know that Puerto Rico is being ravaged by this. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. These are American citizens who have been infected with Zika. They don't have a Senator from Puerto Rico, although I am more than honored and grateful for the opportunity to speak on their behalf on these issues. But what people have to understand is--this is not the right way to approach it, but even if your approach is that it is Puerto Rico and it is not the mainland of the United States, then I invite you to go to the airport in Orlando or Miami, and you can see the daily flights and the constant flow of people back and forth. We also look at the fact that the summer months are coming. This is a mosquito-borne infection. We know that mosquito season is here, and it is coming fast. We know that the Zika virus becomes more potent as temperatures get warmer. Guess what. It is about to get really warm not just in Florida but throughout the Gulf Coast States and throughout the country. We know that places such as Brazil have been deeply impacted by the Zika virus. Guess what. Tens of thousands of people are about to travel through the United States to and from Brazil for the summer Olympics. We know that Major League Baseball canceled a game in Puerto Rico because they believed it was a serious enough risk that they didn't want to put the players at risk, not to mention the crowd. We see something percolating, and we don't know much about it. We know enough about it to know it is a serious problem. We do not know how far this is going to go. As a result, we see the people of this country facing a public health threat, and our response should be to deal with it the way medical experts say we need to deal with it. We can put language in the proposal that says: If you don't end up spending the full $1.9 billion and you don't need all of that money, all of that money automatically goes back to Treasury within it a year or two if it hasn't been spent. Why take the chance? Why take the chance that at some point this summer we could have a significant and serious outbreak in the United States of America when all the Senators are back in their home States doing campaign stuff or whatever they are doing and have to come back here and deal with it and explain to the people why, when doctors and medical experts were warning us that this was a significant risk, we decided to lowball it and spend less than what was called for by experts. By no means do I intend for this to sound as if I am criticizing Senators Murray and Blunt. I thank them for their work. They have tried to come up with a bipartisan proposal that can pass. I said earlier, I am proud of the amendment that my colleague from Florida, Senator Nelson, and I are proposing here today. I hope that the $1.9 billion amount passes, but if we are left with a vote on the Blunt-Murray amendment, I think that is better than nothing, and I will support it. But why are we taking this chance? It makes absolutely no sense. While I am happy that the Senate will hopefully take action on this issue, I am concerned about what I hear coming from the House. I am glad that they are finally beginning to move on the legislation and that something is happening, but I am very concerned about the direction of their own funding measure. Their funding measure isn't even $1.1 billion. It is $622 million, and quite frankly, that will not cut it. If we don't spend more than that on the front end, I believe we will spend a lot more later on because the problem is not going to go away, and it certainly will not go away with $622 million to combat it. This is concerning to me because even if we do manage to pass the $1.9 billion request, I am afraid even that may not be enough for the long term. The issue that seems to be holding them back is the desire to offset spending. As I said, I support that 100 percent. I believe we can find $1.9 billion and transfer it from some other part of our budget to ensure that we are not deficit-spending. We can do that and we should do that. I am in favor of doing that, but that will not keep me from trying to do something about it. In times of public health emergencies, just like during times of natural disasters, I don't think we should delay action while we try to figure out these budgetary moves and try to agree on what we are going to cut from other parts of the budget. I still belive we should do it, but we cannot hold back for another few weeks while we are trying to get to that point. The administration has already diverted half a billion dollars that was intended for the fight against Ebola, but the House would raid even more of the Ebola funds for the Zika response. It is easy to say: Ebola is not in the headlines anymore. We are not reading about it that much, so it must not be a problem. Ebola still exists. It is not polio. We haven't eradicated it from the United States or the world. It is just not a percolating crisis right now, but there is nothing to say that it couldn't pop up again. By the way, these sorts of pandemics will become more and more common as people are able to extensively travel all over the world. We are at the crossroads of a lot of that travel. I don't think I am prepared to walk away. Maybe they don't need the full half a billion dollars, but I think it would be shortsighted to say that Ebola is finished, so we don't have to worry it anymore. There has to be some money available in case that comes up again, because it could. I believe the House can and should do better than what it has proposed and should provide offsets to the spending--provide the $1.9 billion offsets. I guarantee they will be able to find that fairly quickly. They could provide stringent accountability measures. They could stipulate in the law that they pass, for example, that if we are wrong and don't end up spending or needing anything close to $1.9 billion or even $1.1 billion, that the taxpayers' money will be returned to the Treasury. But let's not play with fire. As of now, there are 112 people in the State of Florida who have been infected. We have many more American citizens who have been infected in Puerto Rico. There are many unborn children who are at risk, and many more will be impacted once mosquito season sets in. At the end of the day, these are the people we should be fighting for, and quite frankly, we can do much better than what the House is proposing. This is a devastating disease. It has taken lives throughout our hemisphere, and the way it impacts unborn children alone should call us to action. We have seen the images from Brazil of the children born with microcephaly. This is a devastating condition. The cost of caring for those children throughout their lives is extensive, and we are going to do it. We need to do it, and we will do it, but let's try to prevent it. Let's try to get ahead of it. Let's try not to just be reactive but proactive. There are reports in the press today that scientists have been able to take a significant step toward potentially creating a vaccine. Once there is a vaccine for Zika, this problem will be under control. As I said earlier, let's not play with fire. I hope my colleagues will jump on board and fully fund the $1.9 billion. If they want, we can put language in the legislation that says that if the money isn't fully spent, it will be refunded to the Treasury. Why take the chance? Why take a chance on an issue that is not yet well defined? Why take the chance on a disease that we still don't know everything about? Why take the chance that we could have an outbreak much worse than anything any of us anticipated and be caught off guard? Why take the chance that you will have to go home in August and September and explain to millions of people across this country why so many Americans are now being infected by this disease and you lowballed our approach to it a few months ago? Why take the chance? Let's do it once. Let's get it right. Let's ensure that we are protecting our people and deal with it now and deal with it fully. This is our obligation, and I hope we will embrace it here today. There is no reason we should not fully fund this proposal and listen to the doctors and health care experts who are asking us for this and build from there. I hope that is what my colleagues will do in a few hours when we vote on these proposals that stand before us. With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I am here to talk about two separate topics today. The first is the Zika virus. I am encouraged that in the last 24 hours, we finally seem to have found some action here in Congress in dealing with the Zika virus. We not only have one, we have three separate proposals that will be introduced to deal with Zika. We will continue to work on and debate these proposals next week. About 5 weeks ago, I met with Federal, State, and local health officials in Miami and came out in support of the President's emergency funding request to deal with Zika. Since then, I have come before the Senate on numerous occasions to call for action. I have stated my belief that there shouldn't be anything divisive with this. Zika is a public health emergency that sooner or later will impact the vast majority of the United States because this is a virus transmitted by mosquitoes that are only going to become more prevalent as the weather heats up and because our people routinely travel to and from the island of Puerto Rico, the most impacted community in the entire United States. When I spoke here yesterday, the count of people infected in Florida stood at 109. Since then, just 24 hours later, it has become 112. One- hundred and twelve Zika cases is the most of any State in the Union. Of the three new cases in Florida, two were in Volusia County and one was in Orange County. I have said repeatedly that Congress should not allow politics to delay action on Zika. One issue we have been encountering is the desire to offset the spending. I made it clear that if we can offset the spending and find the money somewhere else in the budget to pay for what it is going to cost to deal with Zika, we should do it, but that in times of public health emergencies, just like natural disasters, we shouldn't delay acting while we figure out and try to agree on what we are going to cut from other parts of the budget. Another issue we have encountered is whether we do this through the normal process that is going on or fund it as an emergency spending bill. Again, I am open to either one of those approaches. But back in the real world, people infected by this and their families, who have already been impacted by this, don't have the time for us to figure all of this out; they just believe, as I do, that we need to get going here and get something done. I have said that we should deal with this issue fully and that the $1.9 billion requested so far may not even be enough when it is all said and done. But I believe there is no one here who wants to get caught in a situation where it is August and people are back in their States, maybe even campaigning for reelection, and have to scramble back here in the middle of the summer to come up with solutions when it gets hotter and there are more mosquitos and when the conditions are ripe for more people to be impacted by Zika. I commend Senator Nelson, my colleague from Florida. I especially commend Senators Murray from Washington and Blunt from Missouri and others who are taking this seriously and trying to come up with a solution and a way forward. This is indeed a devastating disease. It has taken lives throughout our hemisphere, and the way it impacts unborn children alone should call us to action. Let's deal with this now, and let's protect our people. There is no reason that every proposal to address Zika cannot be bipartisan and earn broad support. I am hopeful that we can reach a final outcome that fully addresses the problem. I am hopeful we will see some meaningful action on the Zika public health emergency very soon, including the American citizens in Puerto Rico who have been most impacted so far, and that is one of the reasons I plan to introduce--along with my colleague from Florida, Senator Nelson--an amendment to provide the full $1.9 billion request to fight the Zika virus. The strain on Puerto Rico's health system from Zika must be addressed, and this is the only proposal so far that tries to fully deal with the unique challenges Puerto Rico faces with the Zika virus. I think it is important to remind people who are asking themselves ``Why should we care about Puerto Rico?''--I will remind them that 4 million U.S. citizens live there, that the first American to lose their life to Zika lived in Puerto Rico, and that Puerto Ricans routinely travel to the continental United States--to Florida and New York especially. These 4 million Puerto Rican citizens have no voice here in the Senate, so I will make sure they are not forgotten as we work on solutions to this virus that has disproportionately impacted these Americans. When we return next week to continue debating appropriations bills, I hope we can come together on this issue. I hope we can find a way forward that deals with these issues fully and that helps to stop this disease in its tracks and that saves lives. I urge my colleagues here in the Senate, and the House as well, to look at the proposal Senator Nelson and I will introduce and offer their input and ultimately sign on and get this passed. As we know, it is not going to be enough to see progress here in the Senate; we need the House to act as well, and I hope we can start doing that next week. We need to act. Zika is taking lives, it is hurting unborn children, and this problem is only going to get worse as we move forward.

Mr. RUBIO

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

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, tomorrow I will be visiting the Eureka Garden Apartments in Jacksonville, FL, which is a Section 8 apartment complex that is supposed to provide affordable and safe living conditions for low-income members of the Jacksonville community, but it doesn't. Instead, its tenants have been subjected to dangerous, often downright disgusting living conditions for years. They raised their concerns repeatedly with the managers of the facility and local officials, only to be met for the most part with bureaucratic indifference. My staff and I have been working on this since it first came to light last fall, but there has been a frustrating, disturbing lack of progress from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and, more importantly, from the owner of the complex. Frankly, I have had enough. I am heading down there tomorrow to see what we have to do and whom we need to put pressure on to get things moving. I will be touring the facility and meeting with Tracy Grant, who is the president of the tenants association. I will be joined by Councilman Garrett Dennis, Jacksonville Mayor Len Curry, and Pastor Mark Griffin of Wayman Ministries, who will be meeting with residents. I intend to commend the residents tomorrow for how united and resilient they have been throughout this ordeal, even while the Federal Government failed them. For years the Department of Housing and Urban Development has certified this facility and as a result has put hundreds of families at risk. When HUD inspected the property last summer, they passed the complex with a score of 85 out of 100. Less than a month later, residents were complaining about how bad their living conditions were. When my staff visited the complex, it was nearly unlivable. They saw crumbling stairs, black mold, and exposed electrical wiring that had been covered up by a trash bag. They smelled the natural gas that would soon hospitalize residents days later. This was and is unacceptable. For months, my office, along with Mayor Curry, the city council, and the tenants association, pushed to have improvements and repairs done to this complex. In February, HUD finally had a date by which all repairs must be completed. When the time came to reinspect Eureka Gardens, it passed inspection, and they eventually renewed their contract with the property's owner, but the residents continued to say what they had said all along: HUD's inspections aren't working. Just recently, HUD revealed that Eureka Gardens passed with a score of 62. The passing score is a 60. However, a senior HUD official admitted that HUD officials do not believe the property would currently pass another inspection. HUD essentially admitted that it had certified a failing facility. Something is clearly wrong with the inspection process, and Floridians are being hurt because of it. I will be down there tomorrow to find out how we can put an end to this problem once and for all. The residents of Eureka Gardens cannot be forced to suffer under mismanagement and apathy any longer. Children cannot continue to be put at risk due to gas leaks and other hazardous conditions. HUD cannot be allowed to continue to rubberstamp approval of failing housing complexes, only to further slum-like conditions for the most vulnerable tenants. I will continue to look for solutions to help make sure the conditions in Eureka Gardens are fixed and aren't repeated anywhere else. If we determine that congressional action is necessary, then I am prepared to take it. The residents of Eureka Gardens deserve safe living conditions, and we will make sure that is exactly what they get. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. RUBIO

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

Mr. RUBIO. The second article says: ``Zika findings could be 'game changers,' opening doors to research.'' It begins by saying: Two groups of scientists reported Wednesday that fetal mice infected with Zika showed brain damage, a finding that confirms the prevailing view that the virus can disrupt the development of fetal brains in humans and provides a clearer avenue to study the problem. The work should put to rest lingering doubts in some quarters that the Zika outbreak sweeping through Latin America and the Caribbean is responsible for a surge in babies born with microcephaly and other brain anomalies. It goes on to quote an associate professor of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who says: Let me put it bluntly: These are game changers. . . . We need to move forward now. There is an article dated May 10 in the Miami Herald: ``Two new Zika cases in Miami-Dade raise state total to 109.'' Florida health officials confirmed two new Zika infections in Miami-Dade on Tuesday, raising the statewide total to 109 people who have contracted the virus this year, more than any state. In Miami-Dade, where most of Florida's Zika cases have been reported, 44 people have been infected with the virus, said the state health department, but the disease has not been transmitted locally by mosquito bites. Broward County has reported 15 cases of Zika. At about 5 o'clock today, I will meet with the Governor of our State, who is here asking for Federal aid to prepare for and combat the virus in the State of Florida. The Governor said: It's going to get warmer, we're going to have more rainfall, we're probably going to see more mosquitoes in our state. Our federal government has a variety of plans they're talking about. . . . We've got to address the Zika issue. Hopefully, we can get ahead of it. But it isn't just limited to Florida. This is an article from USA TODAY dated May 6, 2016: ``Gulf Coast could be ground zero for Zika.'' The Gulf Coast may know hurricanes, but this year the region of 60 million people could find itself unprepared and at ground zero for a different type of storm: a mosquito- borne Zika epidemic. A look at the region's urban hubs, small towns and rural outposts shows a patchwork of preparedness. Cities such as Houston have robust plans in place, while smaller towns, such as Corpus Christi, Texas, struggle with fewer resources. This is just part of painting an overall picture of this very serious problem. I would just say that the notion that we should only be worried about Florida or the States on the gulf coast alone would not be wise. Mosquitoes that infect people are found in 30 of the 50 States in this country. There are now Zika infections and Zika cases in multiple States across the country. We now know that Zika isn't just transmitted from mosquitoes but can also be sexually transmitted. In fact, the only case of transmission in Florida was one that was sexually transmitted in Central Florida. As we debate all these other important issues, this is a looming public health crisis. This is the situation we are now facing in this country. The time to act has come. The moment to act has come because right now in this body and in Washington, DC, we are facing a debate about this issue, about how much money we are going to spend on it. Look, the President has proposed $1.9 billion to deal with it. About $500 million of that is designed to pay back the Ebola funding that has been used in the short term to fill in the gap, but the rest of it is for real programs that go into dealing with this issue and particularly dealing with it on the island of Puerto Rico, which has been disproportionately impacted. When I hear people say there haven't been any cases of Zika transmitted in the United States, they are wrong. People of Puerto Rico are American citizens. They travel to the mainland extensively. It is our responsibility to also fight and care for them in this process. But the bottom line is that it is not a question of if, it is a question of when. There will be a mosquito transmission of Zika in the continental United States at some point over next few days, weeks, or months. We cannot get caught unprepared to deal with the consequences. The consequences, by the way, are not just to pregnant women, which in and of itself is reason to act--I don't mean to diminish it. The impact on pregnant women and their unborn children is extraordinary and devastating. The science on that is indisputable. We are seeing evidence of it all across the world and especially the Western Hemisphere being impacted by it. That alone is reason to act. But there is now a definitive link between Zika and Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a debilitating, often fatal neurological condition that we know is associated with this. By the way, these children who are being born after being infected in the womb with Zika, we don't know what the long-term prognosis is. Just because they are not born with microcephaly does not mean they will not suffer from other neurological deficiencies or other neurological conditions in the years to come. We simply don't know. It is not just a first-trimester threat anymore. We now know Zika can be transmitted and can do serious damage in the second trimester as well. We know that soon the Olympic games will be played in Brazil, and that means hundreds of thousands of people will travel from and through the United States to the Olympics and back. We know we have constant visitors coming in and out of this country. How else would we get 109 cases in Florida? These are people who have either traveled abroad or have been infected by a partner in the one case I have cited. This is an issue we should jump on with a real sense of urgency. It is a Federal responsibility to be involved in this. It is the job of the Federal Government to keep our people safe from external threats, and Zika today is an external threat spreading to this country--a country that is at the epicenter of global commerce and transit. It is just a matter of time before someone contracts Zika through a mosquito bite in the United States, and we have not prepared for it. Localities and States are doing the best they can with their limited resources, but they do not have the comprehensive resources the Federal Government can bring to bear. They do not have the resources for research the Federal Government can bring to bear. They do not have the ability to deal with it at the ports of entry the way the Federal Government can. These are important priorities I hope we will move on. In the last few hours, I have heard encouraging reports that there are a number of efforts going on behind the scenes in the Senate--at least one of them in a bipartisan way--to begin to address this issue. Over the next few hours, we will meet with the different stakeholders and others who are engaged in this issue to see if we can come up with a way forward. Here is what I hope we will not do. I hope we will not politicize this issue. Zika is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. It shouldn't be a campaign issue, although I promise it will become one if we have a Zika outbreak in the United States and we are back home doing our constituent work and not here voting. People are going to ask: Why did you do nothing on this issue? You knew it was coming. It was clearly broadcasted and predicted. All the indicators were there and nothing happened. Inaction on this is, quite frankly, inexcusable. I don't believe voters will excuse us for refusing to act on this. This should not be a political issue. It should not be a partisan issue. It shouldn't be used for one party to beat up on the other. There are so many other issues we can fight over but not on this--not where the real lives of real people are at stake. My hope is very soon--and I mean in the next couple of days--we can bring before this body a way forward on this issue that brings both parties together and that deals with this public health crisis in a responsible way. Let me say, look, we are running a debt in this country. So if there is a way to pay for it--and I believe there can be a way to pay for it--I am all for that. I have ideas about how we can come up with some of that money. We can find $1.4 billion, $1.5 billion, $1.9 billion to pay for this, and I think we should endeavor to do so, but even if we cannot, we should never allow the inability to agree on how to pay for it to stand in the way of addressing a public health crisis that threatens to become a public health catastrophe. I prefer that we pay for it. I am for that, but I am not going to let an objection to that stand in the way of addressing this issue. So through all the other issues we are debating today, from Presidential campaigns to water projects, I still do not believe we have given sufficient intensity, urgency or attention to this burgeoning issue that threatens the safety and security of our people. So it is my hope that over the next few hours and days we can come forward in a bipartisan way with a way forward, and I will continue to work to address and to achieve that. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I come to the floor again today to discuss the Zika virus, which has been in the news quite often in my home State of Florida and internationally. In a moment, I want to enter into the Record a number of articles that have appeared just in the last week in papers across the State of Florida. On May 7, the newspaper in Pensacola had this headline: ``Panhandle conditions create a Zika 'powder keg.''' The argument it makes is that part of the State--as are many of the areas in the South--is an area where you find prevalent a species of mosquito which is the primary one that is now transmitting the Zika virus. It goes on to say that as temperatures rise and rainfall increases--these are the two elements that mosquitoes need to spread. So there is going to be a massive spread--as there is every year--in the specific species of mosquitoes that transmit the Zika virus in the panhandle of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the Pensacola News Journal article.

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I have two topics I want to talk about today--actually, three--but I want to begin with the Zika virus. A few weeks ago I went back to Florida on a Friday and I sat down and met with officials from the Department of Health from Florida. I met with leaders from Puerto Rico in the health sector. I met with doctors who live in Miami-Dade County and also officials in Miami-Dade County. They are freaked out about the Zika thing. I don't know any other term to use. If they are freaked out, then I am very concerned about it as well. That is why I do support fully and immediately funding this situation, and I have asked our colleagues to do so as quickly as possible. I want to speak briefly about the Florida experience with this. There are two things that are deeply concerning, and then I will speak to some of the things we should be doing. First, the summer months are upon us. Anyone who has been in Florida, in the summer particularly, knows summer has basically already started in Florida if you go outside. The spread of mosquitoes as a threat virtually everywhere in the State is just massive. It is just a way of life. This very deadly disease is something we are still learning about, by the way. A few weeks ago, they said: Well, Zika impacts only a small population of people--a very significant population of people. We are learning this disease impacts whoever it touches. First of all, you don't have to be symptomatic to spread it. In Florida alone, we have had at least two cases of transmission sexually transmitted. By the way, it is just a matter of time before someone in Florida gets bit by a mosquito. I am telling you, it is just a matter of days, weeks, hours before you will open up a newspaper or turn on the news and it will say that someone in the continental United States was bitten by a mosquito and they contracted Zika. When that happens, then everyone is going to be freaked out, not just me and not just the people who work for the health department in Florida. This is going to happen. There are just way too many mosquitoes to avoid it. The second thing is that Miami-Dade County, in particular, but a lot of Florida, is a transit point for all of Latin America. So, for example, one of the places most impacted by Zika is Brazil. Well, this summer the Olympics are being held in Brazil, and there will be hundreds of thousands of people who cross through Florida to get to Brazil and back, on top of the normal number of travelers. It is just a matter of time. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. So I look at this from a Senate perspective and say: We are going to fund this. We are going to spend money on Zika in Washington, DC, No. 1, because we should. It is the obligation of the Federal Government to keep our people safe, and this is an imminent and real threat to the public safety and security of our Nation and our people. So the money is going to be spent. The question is: Do we do it now, before this has become a crisis or do we wait for it to become a crisis? Maybe that crisis happens in August, when everyone is back home doing their campaign stuff or maybe it happens on Monday, when everyone is back home doing whatever they do on recess. Then everyone will get pulled back to deal with this immediately, and I want to know what Members will say to those who say: Hey, this Zika thing has been in the news for months. Now there is a case. It can be in any State in the country--any State in the country. You may hear: Oh, it is only in certain States that are warm. That is not true. It can be in any State in the country. I want to know what people are going to say when they are asked: What did you do about it? Are you going to say: Well, I had real problems. I wanted to make sure about this and that. This is a serious thing. People's lives are at stake here. And by the way, this is now spreading into all sorts of other threats. Guillain- Barre was mentioned earlier. We know about the birth defects that are very significant. Do my colleagues realize what the cost will be of dealing with all of that? Are people aware of what Guillain-Barre is? It is a debilitating, often fatal, disease. The cost of treating someone that has it is extraordinary. What about where the money is going to be spent? Look, it is possible at the end of the day that $1.9 billion will not even be enough. We don't know. But we have to start. No. 1, we don't have a commercially available plan to test for Zika. You can't just go to Quest Diagnostics and get a Zika test. It doesn't exist. In Florida, if you want to get a Zika test, you have to go through the State department of health. No. 2, a lot of people aren't being tested because they are not a pregnant woman so they do not think they have to be tested. False. If you have traveled anywhere at this point--I don't care who you are, how old you are, male or female--where there are mosquitoes in significant amounts, you probably should be tested. If you have traveled abroad into these danger zones, you can transmit this disease. You can be carrying it and not see manifestations of it for a while. There is no commercially available plan. They talk about mosquito control. They have only been trying that for thousands of years, and mosquitoes have outlasted everything. It is important. It has to be a part of it. But one of the two mosquito species that spreads Zika is resistant to pesticides. It has become resistant to the pesticide, and that is why new technologies need to be developed. There are some innovative ways out there to cut down on the mosquito population. There is an innovative program now, trying to start a pilot program in the Keys. That should be a part of this conversation. Researchers are pretty confident they can find a vaccine for this kind of disease, given its pathology. Maybe not next week, but they can find a vaccine for it. The government has a role to play in basic research that allows the private sector to commercialize that and make that possible. I understand we want accountability for how this money will be spent. I believe that. I do. I think the administration should come forward and say: Here is our plan. Here is where every penny is going to be spent, and here is how we are going to spend it. We should hold them accountable, and if there are ways to improve on that, we should. But I think there should be a sense of urgency when dealing with this issue. I honestly believe--I don't believe; I know--it is just a matter of time before there is a mosquito-borne transmission. By the way, does it really matter how you got it, whether it was from a mosquito or it was sexually transmitted? You have Zika. It acts the very same way once you have it. It is just a matter of time before there is a mosquito-borne transmission in the continental United States. I also have heard--not that anyone here has said it--but I have heard others say there are no cases of Zika transmitted from a mosquito yet in the United States. That is false. Puerto Rico is in the United States. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. By the way, they travel in huge numbers to and from the United States. Many are moving here. Many work here during the week and travel back on the weekends. This is a catastrophe right now in Puerto Rico, which is a United States territory, and its people are American citizens. They are facing a catastrophe right now on this issue. So I hope there is real urgency about dealing with this. I understand this is not a political issue. There is no such thing as a Republican position on Zika or a Democrat position on this issue because these mosquitoes bite everyone. They are not going to ask you what your party affiliation is or who you plan to vote for in November. This is a real threat, and it is not just in the tropical States. They may feel it first, but so can any State that has any significant travel, which is basically all 50 States in the Union. In a country where people travel extensively across the country and around the world, we are going to face a Zika problem in this country this summer and fall. My advice to my colleagues is that we are going to deal with this, so I hope we deal with it at the front end. Not only is that better for our people, but that will be better for my colleagues. Otherwise, we will have to explain why it is that we sat around for weeks and did nothing on something of this magnitude. The second topic I want to--

Mr. RUBIO. I will yield to the Senator from Washington.

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I appreciate the advocacy of the Senator from Washington, and I do look forward to working with the Senator on this as well. Hopefully, we can get a result on this. There is going to be a recess now, and that means for 10 days people will be going back to their home States. So I hope when we come back a week from Monday, we will hear that we have a plan that we are going to be able to vote on and vote on it quickly. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and FDA Advisory Panel Madam President, on a separate topic, I want to call attention to a remarkable group of advocates who are bound together, not by a common race or religion or political ideology but by the common hope of one day ridding the world of a rare disease named Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Duchenne is one of multiple different forms of muscular dystrophy. It affects mostly boys, almost exclusively, at the rate of 1 per 3,600 individuals. Its primary symptom is the steady deterioration of muscle mass beginning early in childhood. By the age of 12, most boys with Duchenne have lost the ability to walk and eventually become paralyzed from the neck down. I am sad to say there is currently no cure for Duchenne, and the average life expectancy is around 25 years. I am personally the parent of four children, including two boys, and I can only imagine--perhaps I can't imagine; that is how difficult it is--what it must be like to have a child receive this diagnosis. Few are called to do more for their child and to show greater courage in the face of the adversity that MD poses than a parent helping their child battle Duchenne. I was recently inspired and humbled a few weeks ago to meet a young man struggling against this disease. His name is Austin, and his dad Joe is a hero in more ways than one. Joe helps Austin combat Duchenne, and he does it alone, as a single father. By the way, he also serves as an Active-Duty member of the United States Air Force. Austin is 12 years old, and I was immediately impressed when I met him. I knew how difficult it must have been for him to travel all the way to Washington from his home in Tampa. This is the embodiment of courage that people living with this disease show every day. Joe shared with me a few of the struggles they face. He told me how Austin is unable to attend school full time because he needs hours of daily physical therapy to stimulate his muscles. He told me how Austin is quickly losing the ability to walk and how he now needs help getting in and out of his wheelchair and other daily tasks. He needs help with eating. Joe told me he spends hundreds of dollars each month on over-the- counter drugs that are not covered by insurance, and he spends hours every Friday attending doctors' appointments. Joe shared the dreams he once had when Austin was born--dreams of being that proud father in the bleachers at little league games or cheering loudly and waving a big foam finger. With Duchenne, he tells me he has even more reasons to proudly cheer Austin on, though the reasons are different. He cheers when Austin is able to get out of bed without help or to walk to the restroom. These are moments of great pride for Joe, when he sees how resilient Austin is in the face of this disease. Joe and Austin traveled to Washington as part of a coordinated effort to witness and participate in FDA action related to Duchenne. As advancements in medical science continue, targeted therapies to treat Duchenne are being developed and tested, and each one--even the ones that fail--is providing us greater insight into the way the disease operates and how it might ultimately be defeated. The last couple of weeks in particular have brought about a display of extraordinary strength from Joe and Austin, and thousands of other parents, children, family, and friends who engage in activism on behalf of those with Duchenne. This Monday, scores of advocates from around the country attended a hearing of the FDA advisory committee, which welcomed them and spent almost an entire day listening to their testimony. What this committee was listening to was the result of a clinical study on a small group. Admittedly, this is a small group of people who have this disease, so any clinical trial will have a small number of people. It is not the same as you would have for another more common disease. So this FDA advisory panel was meeting to decide whether they were going to allow this testing to expand and this drug to be more available. The panel should have reviewed this in the context of a law that was passed in 2012 called the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act; call it FDASIA for short. This act gave the FDA the authority to consider the perspectives of patients when evaluating whether to approve a drug. In essence, it gave the FDA the authority to listen to people who are taking the drug and decide whether it works or not--not just to look at the clinical study. This also provides real flexibility when evaluating drugs for life- threatening illnesses, such as Duchenne. It included multiple provisions to address the challenges of the rare disease patient community, which is by definition small--meaning clinical trials have a more difficult time finding enough participants to meet the FDA's usual requirements. Usually, when it is a drug for cancer or something like that, you have tens of thousands of people you can do a trial for. When it is a rare disease, you have a harder time finding enough people to test it on the way you would for a normal drug. And on top of that--on top of the perspective of a lesser number of people--it is also a disease that is fatal. In the end, all of these cases with Duchenne end the same way, with death, in a very predictable pattern. They had a chance to meet this week and review this in the committee. In the words of someone who was there, who has a lot of experience in interacting with government agencies and bureaucracies, the word they used was ``jarring.'' They said it was jarring. This is from someone who has a lot of experience interacting with government agencies and bureaucracies. They said it was jarring how it went. I want to paint the picture of what that place looked like on Monday. There was an entire community of parents whose kids have Duchenne, who are taking this experimental drug, who are seeing their kids improve. They are seeing it. They know these kids better than any scientist, any doctor, or any panelist at the FDA, and they see these kids are doing better. They see this. They are begging the FDA panel: Please allow us to continue to give these kids medicine. And, by the way, make it available to other kids because, No. 1, there has not been a single documented case of harm; no one using this experimental medicine has been harmed by it. No. 2, we, the parents, are telling you it works because we see it in our kids. And, No. 3, if you take it away, we are desperate; there is nothing left. They are going to die. It is very predictable. The committee ignored them. The committee ruled against them, and it did so because they basically applied the same standard to this drug as they did to a normal one: Oh, you didn't have enough people in the clinical trial. No, there aren't enough people to do a clinical trial with. It is a rare disease. The result is they had this ruling, and I think the vote was 7 to 3. What is interesting is that one of the board members was quoted as saying: Based on all I heard, the drug definitely works, but the question was framed differently. What that means is the way the FDA posed the question to this committee was not just whether the drug worked, but the question was the process: Did this clinical trial have enough people? Was it conducted the normal way--the way other drug tests are conducted? Of course not, because it is not treating a normal condition. It is one with a very small population. The committee spent almost the entire time focused on how the clinical study was designed and not on whether it works. By the way, had the FDA followed FDASIA, the law passed a few years ago, and taken that into account--the small patient population and likewise--they might have reached a different result. Instead, what is happening now is these patients and families are on the verge of losing not just access to the drug but to other families as well. Put yourself in the position of one of these patients. Your son has Duchenne, your son is taking this experimental drug, and you see how he is improving--because you do not improve with Duchenne. It is not one of these things where you get better, worse, better, worse. You get worse and then worse and then worse. It is a steady, predictable decline. So imagine your child is one of those impacted by this disease. You know what the outcome is. It is a predictable, guaranteed outcome. They are taking an experimental drug, and you know it is working because they are not declining. In fact, in many cases they are improving. You are begging the FDA: Please, allow us to continue to give our children this drug. They say: No, we reject it because the clinical trial was not conducted the way it is for normal drugs. Then you would understand the desperation of these parents. There is one last chance. The senior leadership of the FDA has the ability to override this decision and allow this to move forward. I personally hope that is what they will do. In the end, the only thing to lose here is to do nothing. The sad story here would be for these parents, who are already seeing the benefits, to lose access to this drug that they know is having an impact on their children. No one has been able to prove there is any threat that this drug poses to these children. This has been documented. CBS has done a report. Other entities have reported on it. FDA senior leadership has the chance to overrule this committee, which didn't knock it down for purposes of safety or anything of that nature. They just said the clinical trials didn't meet their standard-- and say these kids are going to die anyway if we don't do something. Here is a drug that is showing improvement, and families who are using it are begging them to allow them to use it. Thousands of people do not fly in from around the country or watch online for something that isn't working. If this weren't working, these parents would not be so adamant about it. They see it is working. They know people it is working for. They are desperate to keep it or to reach it. Listen to them. They know what they are talking about. They know. They are the primary caregivers for their children, and they know improvement when they see it. I hope the FDA will consider moving in a different direction. These parents deserve better. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I wish to speak about two separate topics. The first is Venezuela. Venezuela is a country in our hemisphere in total crisis, total chaos, and that is because of a number of things: failed leadership, failed economic policies, a complete societal breakdown, human rights abuses, and now a de facto political coupe that has plagued the country for about 15 years. This all started with Hugo Chavez and has now continued with Nicolas Maduro, his successor. Let's talk about the first cause of the disaster that has now befallen the people of Venezuela--failed leadership. For over 15 years now, Venezuela has been ruled by two strongmen who have mismanaged the country with an iron fist, have squandered its vast wealth and natural resources, they have imprisoned political opponents, they have corrupted all of the country's political institutions to ignore the will of the people and to entrench their power. By the way, this failed leadership has only gotten worse because the successor to Hugo Chavez is a completely incompetent person. On top of the fact he is a strongman, he is incompetent. He does not know what he is doing. The result is this very wealthy country, with a highly educated population, is being led by someone who, quite frankly, isn't qualified to lead anything, much less a nation of the stature of Venezuela. The second cause is failed economic policies. Venezuela suffers from shortages across the board. For example, there are shortages of medicine and medical equipment, which means--and this is not an exaggeration--people are literally dying because their doctors cannot prescribe drugs that aren't available, and the hospitals and the clinics don't have the equipment needed to conduct surgeries. When you speak to medical professionals in Venezuela, they will tell you there are simple medications that could save the life of an individual, but they can't do anything about it. I had someone tell me today they asked a doctor: What do you do when one of your patients is about to die? And he said: Nothing. We comfort them as they die. We don't have basic medicines to deliver to them. Unlike the case of Cuba, by the way, where they are saying it is because of the embargo by the United States--which of course is ridiculous and is another topic for another day--there is no embargo on Venezuela. There are no sanctions on Venezuela and its people. So as a result, there is no explanation for this. The supermarkets are bare. The shelves are completely bare. People there cannot buy food or even basics such as toilet paper, toothpaste, toothbrushes--anything. In addition to the government's political censorship effort, its economic policies also help censor in the sense that there are shortages of paper that independent newspapers need to print their editions. So here is another Machiavellian move the government has made. There is a shortage of paper, and so they make sure the independent press has no access to paper. If you don't have paper, you can't print a newspaper. Things are so bad in Venezuela, economists earlier this month compared Venezuela to Mugabe's Zimbabwe of 15 years ago. The reason that is an unbelievable comparison is because, as I said earlier, Venezuela has one of the largest, if not the largest, oil reserves in the world; they have a highly educated population; they have a well-established business class of professionals; and last year their economy shrank by 5.7 percent, and this year it will shrink by another 8 percent. This is a country that now has rolling blackouts--an energy-rich country that has rolling blackouts. It has gotten so bad that today their so-called President, the incompetent Nicolas Maduro, announced that government employees are only going to work 2 days a week, Mondays and Tuesdays. Government offices will be open only 2 days a week because they aren't turning on the lights. This is the state of one of the richest countries in the world and one of the richest countries in our hemisphere. They have had a total societal breakdown. Economic misery begets desperation, and we are seeing that reflected in the lawlessness that plagues Venezuela. Crime rates are among the highest in the hemisphere, particularly the murder rate. It stems from the top, at the highest levels of leadership. When an incompetent thug is running a country-- someone whose government intimidates opponents by using what they call colectivos, which are nothing more than street gangs, to ride around on motorcycles, causing all kinds of mayhem, shooting and attacking people--it only contributes to the lawlessness. Caracas, Venezuela, which is a beautiful city, is one of the most dangerous places in the world, comparable with war zones in terms of the murder rate. It is basically every man and woman for himself and herself in Venezuela. They have atrocious human rights abuses. Since the government's crackdown on demonstrators and political opponents began in February of 2014, dozens of innocents have been killed, thousands have been beaten and targeted for intimidation, and hundreds have been jailed, including Leopoldo Lopez, who has been a political prisoner now for more than 2 years. We need to demand the release of all 115 political prisoners in Venezuela and respect their rights and those of their families. I heard another horrifying story today. Most political prisoners are men. When their wives go visit them in prison, their wives are strip searched by male guards as an ultimate act of humiliating them. This is the situation in Venezuela. Last, but not least, we have a de facto political coup by the Maduro regime. This country faces a real political and constitutional crisis. Maduro has stacked the country's supreme court with his loyalists, and the supreme court is basically nullifying every law the Congress there passes. The opposition won the election in the last cycle. By the way, they won because the discontent with the government is so massive that they couldn't steal the election. It was so big that not even they could steal the election from them, so they sat this new Congress. He has stacked the supreme court, and the supreme court is literally nullifying law after law--doing it not for judicial reasons but for blatantly political ones. Maduro basically ignores the law. The congressional branch there will pass a law with a veto-proof majority, and he just ignores it. Imagine passing a law out of the House, out of the Senate, and sending it to the President. He can't veto it, and so he just ignores it or refuses to do it. That is the situation in our own hemisphere. The result is an incredible disaster--of deep interest to us, by the way, because of all the uncertainty it is causing in the region. So what can we do about it? First of all, it is in our national interest. The current situation is happening in our own hemisphere. It threatens to destabilize the region. It creates more pressure on our neighbors and our strategic allies, such as Colombia, where Venezuelans have been fleeing to. This creates migratory pressures on the United States. The lawlessness is fueling organized crime, including drug cartels, which senior government officials in Venezuela have established links to, which impacts our entire region. For these reasons and more, the United States has an interest in making sure Venezuela does not spiral further out of control. The first thing we should do is we should be active at the Organization of American States as it considers the situation in Venezuela, and they should ask that voting members recognize the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela. The United States should ask our allies in the region, countries that receive an extensive amount of aid from this country--Haiti, Colombia, the Central American nations, our neighbors up north in Canada, among others--to support this effort. Right now we are about to give hundreds of millions of dollars to countries in Central America, in the Northern Triangle, the Alliance for Prosperity. I think that is a good idea, but we should ask them to support what I hope we will try to do at the OAS. The same with Haiti. We have poured millions of dollars into Haiti's reconstruction. We should use that as leverage to ask them to support something happening at the OAS. What has happened in Venezuela is nothing short of a coup d'etat, a de facto coup, and the Organization of American States--if it has any reason to exist anymore, it should be to defend democracy in the region. It is the reason we have an Organization of American States. We will soon find out whether that organization is even worth continuing to exist if it cannot pronounce itself collectively on the outright violation of democracy in a nation that purports to be a democratic republic. Sanctions. We have to impose sanctions on human rights violators--not sanctions on the people of Venezuela, not sanctions on the government, on human rights violators, many of whom steal money from the Venezuelan people and invest it in the United States. On the front page of the Miami Herald yesterday was a story that one of the individuals linked to the petroleum industry with the Government in Venezuela, a billionaire--and you become a millionaire with these links by basically stealing the money--is the secret developer behind a major development in Miami, FL, in my hometown, in my home State. Travel to Florida, come down there, and let me know--any of my colleagues--and I will show you where these people live, and I will show you the money they have stolen from the Venezuelan people, and they are living the high life on weekends in Miami. You will see them everywhere. That is why we imposed sanctions on them. There will be an effort here, I hope, in the next day or so to extend those sanctions for another 3 years. Finally, I hope the United States uses our megaphone to highlight the corruption in the institutions of the Government of Venezuela. That should not be tolerated. There is also a humanitarian component to this. We should help make sure the Venezuelan Government is not stealing or otherwise standing in the way of the Venezuelan people getting the medicines and food they need. For far too long, the issues in this hemisphere have been ignored by administrations in both parties, by this administration. We can no longer ignore this. I hope we give Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere the attention and the priority they merit. It is in our national interests to do so. Puerto Rico Mr. President, I want to briefly discuss the issue of Puerto Rico and the debt crisis Puerto Rico is facing. The island faces a major deadline coming up. A $422 million debt payment is due on May 1, which is this Sunday. If this deadline isn't met, it is going to cause some serious problems, and not just for the people of Puerto Rico--who, let's not forget, are American citizens--but also for millions of others throughout the United States. Today I will focus on one example of an American community that would be very negatively impacted, and that is the city of Jacksonville in my home State of Florida. Jacksonville is a port city, so its residents, businesses, and families depend in large part on trade. A recent article in the Florida Times-Union detailed exactly how close the relationship is between Puerto Rico and the shipping industry in Jacksonville. In 2009, as much as 75 percent of the goods coming in and out of Puerto Rico flowed through the ports in Jacksonville, which brought about $1 billion worth of economic impact to the city. In just the past year, between October and March, JAXPORT has seen a 32- percent increase in cargo tonnage from the island. But this trend is likely to reverse if fiscal conditions in San Juan do not improve soon. If Puerto Rico misses its payment on May 1 and its debt crisis further escalates, its economy is going to stagnate even more than it already has, and the harm is going to be passed on to any community like Jacksonville that has a significant economic stake in the island's well-being. We have already seen a massive exodus of professionals and others from Puerto Rico because of a lack of economic growth. They will likely continue leaving and heading to Florida and other places on the mainland, which will further cripple the island's economy and reduce the demand for trade. So what can we do about all this? Some have suggested that Washington can deliver a silver bullet solution to help Puerto Rico out of its debt. This simply isn't true. The reality is that nothing Washington does will be effective until Puerto Rico and its government leaders turn away from decades of failed policies. Their tax rate continues to be too high, government regulations are stifling, and they are spending more than they take in. I don't care if you are an island, government, business, or family--if you spend more than you take in and you do it for long enough, you are going to have a debt problem. That is what is happening here in Washington, and that is what is happening in Puerto Rico. Anytime your economy isn't growing, you are going to have a further problem, and no restructuring is going to solve that until they restructure the way they spend money. Bankruptcy protection isn't going to solve it, either, at least not without serious fiscal reforms from San Juan. Otherwise, if we grant bankruptcy protection, Puerto Rico will simply go bankrupt again not far down the road. That does not mean Washington should do nothing. All of us need to realize that this is an American crisis. It is taking place in an American territory. It impacts the people of Puerto Rico, who are American citizens. The impact will not be contained on the island; it will spread to cities like Jacksonville and other communities throughout the mainland United States. So we need to take the irresponsible leadership in Puerto Rico seriously. We need to urge them to get their affairs in order. But we should also look closely at what we can do here in the Senate, which may mean taking up some of the ideas currently being worked on by House leadership. We can also help Puerto Rico by doing the same things necessary to help the rest of the American economy. This means passing pro-growth policies at the Federal level, including tax and regulatory reform. It means we need to stop spending more money than we take in. In closing, the leadership in San Juan must view the deadline this Sunday as a wake-up call. They must show their willingness to get their fiscal house in order. If they don't, our options in Washington will be very limited and won't have support from taxpayers. But I think this is a wake-up call for us. The notion that somehow this issue with Puerto Rico will figure itself out is not true. The notion that somehow this issue with Puerto Rico is not that important, that we can put it to the side because it is not a State, is not true. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. Its people are U.S. citizens. Its people, by the way, on a per capita basis serve in the Armed Forces of the United States at levels as high or higher than any ethnic or geographic group in the country. The people of Puerto Rico deserve our voice, and they deserve our action. I commend leaders in the House for trying to do something responsible on this. I understand the majority leader has said that once the House acts, the Senate will look at it very carefully. I know we have leaders here doing that as well. I urge that work to continue. We cannot ignore this crisis, and neither can the leaders in San Juan. I hope we can find a solution sooner than later for what Puerto Rico is facing with its fiscal crisis, which this Sunday we are going to be reading about when they miss their debt payment. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I come to the floor today to discuss, first of all, the successful location of the El Faro voyage data recorder by the NTSB. As you all recall, that was the ship that had sailed from Jacksonville and was lost at sea and everyone perished. Today, the NTSB found the data recorder. The U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, and other search partners were also involved. That gives me hope that we will soon have more answers about this terrible disaster and how to prevent a similar one from happening again. So I want to thank the men and women of the investigative team who worked together to find this important piece of the El Faro puzzle. Today we are also reminded of those who were lost on the El Faro and the loved ones they left behind. They remain in our thoughts and prayers. Zika Virus Madam President, on a different topic, I wanted to come to the floor today and talk again about the Zika virus. Once again there was an announcement that there had been additional cases identified in Florida. Just to recap where we stand now, Zika has now spread to over 43 countries. There are 500 cases in U.S. territories, most of them on the Island of Puerto Rico. In my home State of Florida, there are now 93 cases--the most of any State--and the peak mosquito season is directly ahead. A lot has happened regarding Zika. We have learned more and more about this disease. For example, we are now learning the virus has a direct link to Guillain-Barre syndrome, a very debilitating, often fatal, illness, and it is striking people affected with it. We are learning through recent science that it is not just the first trimester of pregnancy but also potentially in the second trimester that unborn children can be impacted by this, and the impacts are devastating. We are learning that of the two species of mosquitoes that spread the disease, one of them has developed an immunity, a resistance to the most commonly used pesticide to remove them. So there is real concern as we head into the summer months and mosquitoes begin to appear that soon we will wake up to the news that there has now been a mosquito- borne transmission within the continental United States. Here is the bottom line: We don't know everything about this disease. We already know it is bad, but we don't know how bad it is. Every day we find out more things. We know during these summer months it will be increasingly warm in many parts of the country where the two mosquito species that spread the virus can be found--in 30 out of 50 States. We know those mosquitoes tend to grow even faster during warm seasons and when there is a lot of water on the ground. And we know one of the countries most impacted by it--Brazil--will soon host the Summer Olympic Games, which means there is going to be a tremendous amount of travel to and from Brazil, and, in fact, there already is. We know the disease is not just spread through mosquitoes, but it is also sexually transmitted. The result of all this is that there is a real concern about what direction we are headed. The President has asked for $1.9 billion in funding, and I am generally supportive of that request. I believe we need to deal with these issues on the front end as quickly as possible. We don't want to wake up one morning to the realization that we are now in the middle of summer, this has become an epidemic or a catastrophe, and we didn't do anything on the front end. Everyone here will have to explain what their position was at the time. I also think you can be for Zika funding--you can even be for Zika funding at $1.9 billion--and you can also ask questions about how this money is going to be spent and, if possible, how we are going to pay for it because we are facing a debt situation in this country. I believe we can find $1.9 billion to pay for it. I have suggested some of my own. What we don't want to do is to play political games with this. I think it is important. On the one side, you can't just say: Look, I am against anything they are asking for that comes up unless you prove otherwise. I think it is important that we now admit this is a serious issue that needs to be confronted. But it is also not being an obstructionist to ask: How is the money going to be spent? What programs will be funded? Where is the prioritization going to be? I think it is not too much to ask to have a level of detail about that $1.9 billion. What I am concerned about is some of the reports in the news that there are games being played with this. We have heard the news that the administration has redirected $44 million in emergency preparedness grants promised to State and local governments this summer. Oftentimes in politics this is a very typical maneuver. What you do is, you cut money from an organization somewhere and you blame it on congressional inaction--or in the States, on legislative inaction. And they say the reason you are losing this money is that someone is not doing what we want, so you find the most painful, alarming cuts and use them as a leverage point to get pressure built on Congress. So I want to make sure that this is not part of some game. We shouldn't be playing games with this. I think it is also important to understand why, in addition to the $1.9 billion, they are also saying on top of that we also have to repay the $510 million in Ebola funds since the Ebola situation is now under control. These are all legitimate issues that need to be confronted. But in the end, we have to do something about this. I know the Senate and the Congress were not meant to move at warp speed, to say the least. It is a place in which action takes time, and I understand that. But there are things we don't have time for. This issue has to be dealt with on the front end. Summer is here already. If you have been in South Florida, as I have on weekends, and back in my home State, as I will be again this Friday and into the weekend, it is already hot. That heat, combined with a wet season, means mosquitoes. This is mosquito season. We have a disease that is already creating this catastrophic impact in countries neighboring us to the south. We know it is spread by mosquitoes. Mosquito season is rapidly approaching, and we have to get ahead of this. None of us wants to be in a position in June, July, and August where this thing breaks out and we start seeing cases in the continental United States, as we are already seeing in Puerto Rico and in Brazil, and we have no answer for why we did nothing during these months we were here. I don't know what all the impediments are. I know there are conversations going on at the committee level, but I hope we can bridge this rather quickly. There are so many other issues we can argue about. There are so many other issues we can have debates about in the partisan season. But I don't think a disease of this magnitude, with this level of risk, is one we should be playing games with. My hope is that cooler heads will prevail and that over the next few days we will find it within ourselves to find out how to appropriate the necessary money so we can begin to deal with this, at least on the front end. Maybe there is a chunk of money on the front end so we can begin to address it and then we can come back later and fund the rest of it. I think it is incumbent upon the administration and others to say ``This is what the money is going to be spent on'' so we can judge whether the money and the funds are actually going to things that work. But this needs to happen. This problem can't wait, and it shouldn't be a partisan fight. Combating Zika is an appropriate use of public dollars. It is an appropriate use of public dollars. I am for limited government. I am for a very limited Federal Government. But one of the things the Federal Government is tasked with is keeping our people and country safe, particularly from external threats. Traditionally, what that means is an invading army or some military threat from abroad or whatever. In this case, this is a threat emerging from abroad, but it is coming toward the United States. There is nothing that prevents the United States from becoming like some of these other countries that have been impacted by this--nothing. Our people are not genetically immune to Zika. It is a matter of time. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when there will be a mosquito-borne transmission of the Zika disease here in the United States. And when that happens, if the posture of the Congress has been that we did nothing--nothing has happened on this; we are still debating over $200 million or $50 million--people will not be satisfied with that answer. So my hope is that this is dealt with according to the level of urgency it deserves. As I said, in my home State of Florida we already have 93 cases, with 2 new ones over the weekend. Those numbers are only going to grow. It is just a matter of time before there is a mosquito- borne transmission somewhere in the United States--the continental United States, because, as I said, this has already occurred in Puerto Rico--and I hope we get ahead of it before it is too late. As I speak to the appropriators and those involved in this, my hope is that we can find our way forward on this rather quickly. There are so many other issues to argue about; this should not be one of them. The money needs to be spent the right way, but it needs to be spent and it needs to be appropriated, and we should endeavor to pay for as much of it, if not all of it, as we can. It needs to get quickly to the target. We need to move from this process and on to those programs so we can get ahead of it in May and June, before we get into the summer, before we get into mosquito season, and before we have an outbreak in the United States. If not, we then will have to answer to the people as to why nothing happened when we knew the risk was growing and the threat was emerging. With that, Madam President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I agree that the U.S.-Mexico relationship is one of our most important bilateral relationships. We do need an ambassador in Mexico City who has a track record of effectively advancing U.S. interests. I do, however, have serious questions about the policies that Assistant Secretary Jacobson has pursued during her tenure in the Western Hemisphere Bureau. I have had conversations with the administration and others, such as Senator Corker, about the concerns, and I remain hopeful that we can find a way to resolve this issue in the very near future, but until then, I object.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.