Reid waited until the last hour of the year to bring this bill to the floor for a vote by the legislature and was turned down by the Republicans. The press and RINOs went nuts, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Peter King from New York went on TV demanding action.
The fact that this bill of 60 billion was to aid the flood victims in New York, New Jersey and other states, was designed to be passed without debate for a good reason, it contained 51 billion dollars of pork, items that have no connection to aiding the victims of this huge storm disaster.
The Republicans waited until Friday to pass one section of the bill that was to aid the victims only, 9 billion dollars. The rest of the bill will now be debated on the floor all the nation to see.
Do you wonder who produced this travesty at the last minute, behind closed doors? Just like most other bills that seek to steal tax dollars, the progressive socialist liberal Democrats in the Senate.
Did the press put this on the front page of their Marxist rags, of course not. It's the socialist Democrats that are screwing the taxpayers and the Sandy victims, so it's okay with the media. The press turned a blind eye to the Democrats fraud.
But who is attacked by the Marxist for not jumping on the band wagon of fraud and out right theft of Chinese money, the Republicans.
Hey, but wait, who voted for the progressives agenda of decline and poverty in November? Who decided our country will be better off with millions living in card board boxes and waiting in soup lines? The Unemployed at 24 million and going up every day. Who voted to put two more progressive socialist into the Senate? Who? Why?
(Heritage Foundation)
Leaders from New Jersey and New York blew up yesterday after House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) postponed a vote on an aid package related to Hurricane Sandy. But the bill is so loaded with pork projects that these officials should consider directing their anger at the Obama Administration, which is hijacking the aid meant for their constituents.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie “in an angry news conference decried the ‘selfishness and duplicity,’ the ‘palace intrigue,’ ‘the callous indifference to the people of our state,’” ABC News reported.
Representative Peter King (R-NY) accused Boehner of “plunging ‘a cruel knife in the back’ of storm-ravaged residents ‘who don’t have shelter, don’t have food.’”
The real “selfishness and duplicity,” however, comes from those who insist that this bill is meant for Sandy’s victims—when in reality, it is a special-interest money fest. This is a terrible way to treat storm victims, by piling on other projects and tying them to an emotional legislative vote.
It amounts to exploiting disaster victims, which is inexcusable. That’s where the anger should be focused.
The estimate of insured losses from Sandy comes in around $20 billion—but the total aid package proposed is three times that amount. Roughly $28 billion of the request is marked for future disaster-mitigation projects.
The bill includes funding for Head Start, the federal day care program. As Heritage’s Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman fellow in education policy, explains, some Head Start centers may need repairs from hurricane damage, but handing the program $100 million—as the Sandy aid package would—is a large expenditure that deserves more scrutiny.
Other questionable items in the package, which have received wide media coverage, include money for fisheries in Alaska, free money for the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and repairs to the Smithsonian. Heritage’s Patrick Louis Knudsen adds that “there is the truly audacious $17 billion in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds, an embarrassingly transparent slush fund.”
As Heritage visiting fellow Matt Mayer has said, there is a much larger issue here. The spending request:
reflects the President’s cavalier attitude toward spending and deficits. He intends to exploit loopholes in the Budget Control Act that allow this new spending, above existing spending limits, without offsets. In an era of chronic trillion-dollar deficits, this is an act of willful fiscal negligence.Mayer says the priority should be Sandy’s real victims: “all requests for funding for federal departments and agencies that does not flow to states, localities, businesses, or citizens for response and recovery activities should not be included in this supplemental request.”
Hurricane Sandy is the type of disaster that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should address. Federal assistance is needed. But the Obama Administration’s exploitation of hurricane victims for billions in additional government spending deserves an angry response from those affected by the storm.
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