The U.S. Senate's leading Democrat found himself in embarrassingly hot water Wednesday, after dismissing the idea of funding children's cancer research through the government shutdown.
'If you can help one child, why won't you do it?' asked CNN reporter Dana Bash.
'Why, why, why would we want to do that?' countered Reid.
'I have 1100 people at Nellis Air Force Base that are sitting home,' because of government employee furloughs, he told Bash and a roomful of other journalists. 'They have – they have a few problems of their own.'
'This is – to have someone of your intelligence suggest such a thing maybe means you're as irresponsible and reckless.'
The CNN correspondent had challenged Senate Democrats' earlier lament that clinical trials for pediatric cancer therapies were among government services cut off Monday at midnight. The two houses of Congress, run by opposite parties, were unable to agree on the terms of a continuing resolution to fund the government in its new fiscal year.
'You all talked about children with cancer unable to go to clinical trials,' she began. 'The House is presumably going to pass a bill that funds the NIH. Will you, at least, pass that? And if not, aren't you playing the same political games that Republicans are?'
The first one, which provided military servicemen and women with paycheck guarantees, passed easily on Monday. After Reid declined to block it in the Senate, President Obama signed it two hours before the shutdown deadline.
But the other five proposals, including one that would continue funding the National Institutes of Health, are still in doubt.
That bill, and another freeing up money to pay members of the National Guard and military reserve units, were added on Wednesday to three that failed to pass a day earlier.Those isolate and fund the national parks, museums and monuments; the Department of Veterans Affairs; and the city government of Washington, D.C.
Via: Daily Mail
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