Hurricane Harvey is on pace to produce the greatest single-storm rainfall in the United States in at least a century and may wind up being one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. To make matters worse, since much of the damage is occurring inland and outside of the 100-year floodplain, insurance coverage will be low.
Naturally, a congressional relief package will be forthcoming. Which means it’s time to turn to another round of Southern Republicans Who Voted Against the Hurricane Sandy Relief Package but Will Soon Want Federal Disaster Money for Their Flooded Homes. (Previous contestants included the congressional delegations of Florida and Louisiana.)
This time the spotlight is on Texas, where 20 sitting Republican congressmen and both of the state’s senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted against the 2013 Sandy Relief Act. (Ironically, in the 2011–2012 fiscal year, Texas received more federal disaster relief money than any other state.)
Republicans hate the comparison, arguing that the Sandy relief package contained spending for unrelated items. (This is true of virtually every single-issue spending bill that passes Congress; even a vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense said the 2013 package was “better than business as usual.”) Cornyn communications director Drew Brandewie essentially argued that Cornyn was for it before he was against it, voting for a pared-down version of the legislation.
At the time, conservatives also insisted on cuts to federal spending elsewhere to justify Sandy expenses, an unusual and onerous requirement for a disaster aid bill. (This was during the pre-“Mexico Will Pay for It” era, when the national debt was still a serious GOP conceit.) “Emergency bills like this should not come to the floor without offsets to pay for it or structural reforms,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas said.
Rep. Peter King from Long Island, one of the Republicans who voted for the final bill, doesn’t buy the argument that his Southern colleagues were making a good-faith effort to help New York and New Jersey recover. But, he said, Texas has nothing to worry about. “I won’t abandon Texas the way Ted Cruz did New York,” he wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
