It’s been a disappointing week for conservative pressure groups, but they clearly listened to their Chumbawumba. The Club for Growth, which can’t get enough credit for scaring Republicans away from moderation, has informed members that it will hold it against them if they support today’s fragmented, partial Sandy relief bill.
The Club for Growth urges all members of the U.S. House to vote “NO” on the bill to expand the National Flood Insurance Program’s borrowing authority by $9.7 billion. Consideration of the plan on the House floor is expected to occur today. This vote will be included in the Club for Growth’s 2013 congressional scorecard.
Congress should not allow the federal government to be involved in the flood insurance industry in the first place, let alone expand the national flood insurance program’s authority.
As we have said in a previous key vote alert, the proper way to address disaster relief is to release the funds in installments to make sure the resources are spent wisely. They should also strip out all immaterial line items, and fully offset all expenditures with spending cuts elsewhere. Serious reform would also include a way for the states to take over the responsibility for future disaster relief funding so that accountability is more localized.
Related, sort of: Andy Kroll has scooped the December 2012 FreedomWorks board report. His focus is on the report’s boasts of big, dark donations, sometimes of $1 million in one go, fungible money which was sent over to the FreedomWorks Super PAC. (The Super PAC, like FreedomWorks’s other organs, lost staff in last month’s internal strife.)
