From the "This Again?!?" Department: The federal government may shut down at the end of next week unless Congress can agree on a new spending bill. What's holding things up this time? The highly controversial issue at the heart of the disagreement is whether to spend money to help the victims of things like Hurricane Irene and tornadoes in the Midwest. Yeah, I know, they were asking for it, but still. . . .
See, most House Democrats and a number of Republicans voted against a bill that would have authorized about $3.5 billion in disaster relief. The Democrats object that the bill is insufficient; indeed, a similar Senate bill, which has a certain level of bipartisan support, authorizes about twice as much.
What really riles Democrats, though, is the Republican leadership's insistence that any disaster funding be paid for by offsetting spending cuts elsewhere. In fact, the Republicans who voted against the bill objected that the measure didn't include ENOUGH cuts.
Do Republicans not understand that people have lost their homes? Do they really think now is the time to be playing budget games? And for anyone tempted to play devil's advocate--for anyone who says, "Well, look, we DO need to find a way to pay for these things! It's not like we can just PRINT more money! (Well,OK, we can, but still. . . .)"--consider that the same folks who are saying we must make cuts to pay for responses to unforeseen disasters are many of the same folks who saw no need to make cuts to pay for the foreseen disasters of the Bush administration. As Nancy Pelosi said, "We never paid for tax cuts for the rich. We never paid for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Oh, sorry. I suppose I'm engaging in class warfare here.
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