GREAT NEWS!!! Our Sweet GG did it! Thirteen and a half months after Gabriella died she moved our Congress to come together for our children battling disease. Congress stopped talking and started doing! The Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act has made it into the government funding Bill that the House and the Senate will vote on THIS week!! The section of the Bill that includes the GMKFRA is 177 pages long. The link below includes a summary of each section of the legislation. Not only is the GMKFRA included in the legislation but it is prominently featured in the three page summary attached below! On November 14, 2013, two weeks after Gabriella died, House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, contacted Mark and I to ask if we would allow Gabriellas name to be attached to Bill that would move $126 MILLION dollars from political party conventions to NIH for childhood disease research. After much opposition for this Bill it came to a vote in the House in December 2013. It PASSED with a 295 - 72 vote (295 Congressmen voted for it and 72 voted against it). It then moved onto the Senate where it passed - UNANIMOUSLY - in March 2014. Then, Mark, Jake and I stood in the Oval Office on April 3, 2014 as President Obama signed the Bill into law. Despite the fact that the president of the United States signed this Bill into law, it did not mean that one penny of this money would ever be appropriated. Thus started our visits up to Capitol Hill where we regularly met with Congressmen and Senators to share our story and to request (beg and plead) for them to weigh in with those members on the Appropriations committee to fund this Bill. We soon found out that, thanks to those regular visits to the Hill, the Bill made language in the Senate Labor HHS. NOT a line item that would guarantee funding. Language is merely a suggestion which could be (and all to frequently is) ignored. But, we did get mentioned. Now, we needed to get that line item to ensure that funding for 2015. Thanks to so many individuals and organizations, working together towards a common goal, we succeeded the first time out the gate! Thank you and congratulations! We did it! We have made a tremendous difference in the world of childhood disease research!
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:24:12 +0000
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