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Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Different oxen getting gored while Houston is getting wet.

Michael Hiltzik writing August 28, 2017, for LA Times:

On Saturday, the New York Daily News was quick to underscore the irony in Cruz and Cornyn scurrying to secure emergency assistance for their home state after voting against Sandy relief. “The devastation of Hurricane Harvey has two-faced Texas politicians looking for the same sort of relief funding they flatly opposed five years ago,” the newspaper reported.

Of the 24 GOP members of the Texas House delegation in 2013, all but one voted against the Sandy relief package in 2013. The one “yea” vote was Rep. John Culberson, whose district includes Houston. But seven other Houston-area congressmen voted the package down. All 12 Democratic members of the delegation voted in favor of Sandy relief with the exception of Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents central Houston and didn’t cast a vote. Three Republicans and two Democrats in office at the time of the vote are no longer serving in Congress.

Most of the lawmakers who commented on the 2013 Sandy appropriation couched their opposition in terms of fiscal responsibility. The issue, they said, was that the Sandy bill had been larded down with non-Sandy and non-emergency spending. “Emergency relief for the families who are suffering from this natural disaster should not be used as a Christmas tree for billions in unrelated spending," Cruz said then.

Others demanded that every dollar spent on Sandy relief be balanced by a dollar cut somewhere else in the federal budget. As I wrote last year, when Louisiana congressmen who voted against Sandy were tasked with securing relief for victims of Hurricane Matthew, this position elevated the ideology of the balanced budget to an article of faith. Notably, the lawmakers insisting on a one-for-one trade-off against Sandy aid were never specific about where the cuts should come from.

[Link is from original, other links in original omitted]

Well . . .

Arguable guidelines the linked Cruz item expounds which might apply to the Houston disaster recovery:

Emergency relief for the families who are suffering from this natural disaster should not be used as a Christmas tree for billions in unrelated spending, including projects such as Smithsonian repairs, upgrades to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration airplanes, and more funding for Head Start.

[...] This bill is symptomatic of a larger problem in Washington – an addiction to spending money we do not have. The United States Senate should not be in the business of exploiting victims of natural disasters to fund pork projects that further expand our debt.

So Ted says pork for Big Oil in terms of public funding of refinery upgrades; and hasty ill-reasoned pipeline approvals would be inappropriate. It is good to know that. Even while Ted's statement's precise wording years ago was not prescient about expected overreaching by Big Oil, it fits.

Cutting the military budget would help against further expanding our debt. But the underlying problem, Canadian Ted Cruz, needs voter action. Indeed, the pack of them are problematic there in Texas, which in hindsight arguably ought to have been allowed to remain "The Lone Star Nation," years ago when a different outcome happened.