Among the things Congress has managed to not do this year is allocate money for responding to the mosquito-borne, birth-defect-causing disease Zika. That money would go toward everything from vaccine research to mosquito abatement to testing to prevention education---all the stuff you need to minimize a virus' reach, hard-won epidemiology lessons. The disease has already infected 20,000 people in the continental US, including at least 1,500 pregnant women, and another 15,000 people in Puerto Rico.
So why the stall on the funding? Republicans added a rider to the bill that would make the Puerto Rican division of Planned Parenthood, Profamilias, ineligible to get the money. Democrats see that language as a poison pill, just as Republicans knew they would. Cue the legislative deadlock.
On the bright side, that means that there's someone to blame for this mess: whoever added the rider to the bill.
No one in Congress will say who that person is.
Now, the Zika funding bill has been pinging around the legislative branch since February, when the Obama administration first requested $1.9 billion to combat the virus. So there'd already been some serious foot-dragging going on. But things got way worse when the rider showed up in June. Here's what it actually says:
"That of the funds appropriated under this heading, $95,000,000 shall be transferred to the
'Social Services Block Grant' for health services provided by public health departments, hospitals, or reimbursed through public health plans, notwithstanding section 2005(a)(4) of the Social Security Act, in States, territories, or tribal lands with active or local transmission cases of the Zika virus."
Not what you'd call reader friendly. And nobody on either side of the aisle seems solid on what it means, or how broadly it can be interpreted. Basically, when they say "public," they're really saying "anything but Planned Parenthood." The language specifically applies to Profamilias. Republicans have been emphasizing that Profamilias only runs a few clinics---11 locations, and the two in San Juan see the most patients.
Even so, restricting funding there would cause real problems. Zika disproportionately impacts the young and poor---exactly the demographic that forms of the majority of Profamilia's clientele. These clinics help women in high Zika-risk areas gain access to birth control, so they can delay pregnancy until the danger has passed. And they're also where pregnant women who have contracted Zika can get safe, medically recommended abortions.
Because the provision is so vague, many Democrats worry that passing any bill that limits Planned Parenthood, even conditionally, might set a dangerous precedent. Cutting off funding for the health care organization has been a major focus of GOP legislators.
So where did this stipulation come from? You'd think public records would show, and yes, it'd be easy to figure out if the addition had been an amendment to the original bill. Those come with the names of their sponsors attached. But while the bill that addresses the Zika emergency response appropriation has 307 amendments, none of them include the funding stipulation.
The language actually comes from a conference report, which is something that happens when parties are unable to resolve their differences through normal legislative processes; in that case, they appoint a conference committee made up of senior standing committee members.
The relevant standing committees here are the Committees on Appropriations for the House and the Senate (basically, budget nerds from both parties).
The conference committee met on June 15 to discuss military construction, veterans affairs, and Zika response. According to Matthew Dennis, Communications Director at the House Appropriations Committee, the meeting took about five minutes, and the conferees at this point were the following bipartisan group of 30 congresspeople.
The Republicans:
- Senator Susan Collins (Maine)
- Senator Mark Kirk (Illinois)
- Senator Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
- Senator John Hoeven (North Dakota)
- Senator John Boozman (Arkansas)
- Senator Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)
- Senator Thad Cochran (Mississippi)
- Senator Roy Blunt (Missouri)
- Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
- Congressman Hal Rogers (Kentucky)
- Congressman Tom Cole (Oklahoma)
- Congresswoman Kay Granger (Texas)
- Congressman Charlie Dent (Pennsylvania)
- Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (Nebraska)
- Congressman Thomas J. Rooney (Florida)
- Congressman David Valadao (California)
- Congresswoman Martha Roby (Alabama)
The Democrats:
- Senator Jon Tester (Montana)
- Senator Patty Murray (Washington)
- Senator Tom Udall (New Mexico)
- Senator Brian Schatz (Hawaii)
- Senator Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin)
- Senator Chris Murphy (Connecticut)
- Senator Barbara Mikulski (Maryland)
- Senator Patrick Leahy (Vermont)
- Congresswoman Nita Lowey (New York)
- Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut)
- Congressman Jose Serrano (New York)
- Congressman Sanford Bishop (Georgia)
- Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Florida).
But this committee meeting didn't generate the conference report. In fact, Hal Rogers, the Kentuckian congressman, filed the conference report on June 22 without the approval (or signatures) of any Democrats on the committee. According to Dennis, that's highly unusual.
Then the GOP-only conference report passed the House on June 23 ... while Democrats were having a gun control sit in. Democrats in the Senate successfully blocked the bill on June 28, and have been blocking it ever since.
Teresa Davis, communications director for Congressman Tom Cole, confirmed the Republican conferees, and added Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's name to the mix. "The leaders determine what happens regardless of whether or not they are members of the conference committee," Dennis says. OK, so now we're working with 18 names instead of 30.
WIRED reached out repeatedly to all their offices asking each to confirm they were conferees, whether they had authored the language in the rider, and if they did not, did they know who did? (We also contacted the Democratic conferees. The response from each office was the same: the Dems were conferees to the first meeting, but had nothing to do with that conference report.) Of the Republicans, only Cole, Dent, Kirk, and Valadao got back to us, and of those three only Dent explicitly denied introducing the language. That leaves 17 possibilities ... and the end of the official trail.
But with some speculation, we can shrink the size of the pool further. Britt Logan, press secretary for Republican conferee Senator Mark Kirk, says in an email that he heard the author "was in the House." If that's true (and that's a big "if"), that leaves only Rogers, Cole, Granger, Fortenberry, Rooney, Roby, and Valadao. Seven!
They're all plausible authors. Each has spoken against Planned Parenthood. Roby and Rooney wrote op-eds about the merits of this rider in particular. But Rooney is from Florida, the state likely to be most affected by the virus. Under the terms of the bill, funding will be allocated proportional to need. If Planned Parenthood isn't disqualified from receiving that funding, that could strengthen Planned Parenthood's presence in his state, which might help his constituents---but is at odds with his public position. So does that make Rooney more likely to have been the author, or less?
In a way, it might not matter. Zika emergency response provisions will probably end up attached to a continuing resolution that Congress must pass by the end of the month to avoid a government shutdown. So the money might yet come, albeit belatedly---and at great cost to those people already infected. It'd be nice to know where to send the bill.
