Florida governor cancels Zika trip to Washington after storm

Members of Congress are returning for the first time after the seven-week summer recess with one primary task looming: keeping the government’s lights on past the end of this month. A shutdown is highly unlikely, but a showdown over Zika money could keep tensions running high in Washington and at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congressional leaders’ immediate focus will be preventing a government shutdown, a prospect created by lawmakers’ failure to pass the 12 annual spending bills that tell federal agencies how to spend billions in taxpayer dollars.

The measure also includes $1.1 billion for fighting the virus. “Without additional funding we will not be able to fully understand the impact of Zika”.

Lawmakers also will confront a pressing problem they left behind in July: How to pay for efforts to combat the Zika virus, which is now being transmitted by mosquitoes in Florida, has been linked to the death of an infant in Texas, and has been declared a public health emergency in Puerto Rico. In this case, that means preventing the government from shutting down and finally providing money for the government’s battle against the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

How did we get here? The National Institutes of Health began vaccine trials last month, but it will be at least a couple of years before such a vaccine could become available.

Here’s a detailed explainer on where Congress stands with regards to Zika.

Democrats have a number of items they’d like to accomplish: votes on gun control legislation, passing aid for Flint, Michigan as it continues to respond to the water crisis, funding for the opioid epidemic and more.

“It’s hard to explain why – despite their own calls for funding – Senate Democrats chose to block a bill that could help keep pregnant women and babies safer from Zika”, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Capitol Hill is back in session on Tuesday after resembling a ghost town for the last two months.

Georgia’s senior USA senator, Republican Johnny Isakson, said Congress needs to put partisanship aside and approve more Zika money, even if it is not offset with new spending cuts.

Congress must only pass a short-term spending bill that would prevent the government from shutting down on October 1, which seems sure to pass, and, more daunting, pass a bill that would provide money for the fight against the Zika virus. But getting them through a deeply divided Congress and to the floor for a vote has proven highly hard in years past. “The question is whether the House will go along with any deal the Senate reaches”.

Democrats and some Republicans favor getting the work done before the end of the year, by passing a short-term patch and then grinding out a final comprehensive agreement after the November 8 election in a lame duck session. “We are not doing anything into next year”. Perdue is part of a group of lawmakers in the House and Senate pulling together a package of budget measures aimed at cutting down on the need for stopgaps. Other measures, such as gun-control legislation and the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, face longer odds for passage.

Ever since the GOP gained control of Congress in 2014 Republican leadership has promised to send President Obama a dozen appropriation bills. That hasn’t stopped some Republican senators from sticking to custom and meeting privately with Garland. The agenda, which Trump has largely ignored, gives GOP members a way to separate themselves from the controversial nominee and point to specific plans they intend to pursue in the next Congress.

The impact of a split 4-4 high court is already being felt in Washington.

The House also has plans to vote on a bill that serves as a direct response to the White House-sanctioned transfer of $400 million to Iran on the same day four US prisoners were freed earlier this summer. Republicans charge the White House paid that country ransom for the release of three Americans held there, something the administration strongly denies.

But Reid, whose caucus has the power to filibuster a spending bill it doesn’t support, rejected that approach.