A pork-barrel feast of goodies for federal agencies to fix museum roofs in D.C. and aid fisheries in Alaska, cooked up in the middle of the night, is not the way to aid hurricane victims or run a government.
As if the fallout from agreeing to a bad deal that raises the debt by $4 trillion and accepts a 41-1 ratio in tax hikes to spending cuts weren't enough, Speaker of the House John Boehner has New Jersey's Chris Christie on his case.
"There's only one group to blame," the New Jersey governor said of the Sandy relief bill that was not included in the fiscal cliff deal, "the House Majority and John Boehner."
Christie, the man who hugged President Obama during his post-hurricane photo-op for doing a "good job," can't understand why Boehner, in a brief moment of fiscal sanity, decided the pork-laden Sandy relief bill might need a tad more examination before we rush to fix the roof on the Smithsonian Institution and subsidize fisheries in hurricane-ravaged Alaska.
"The House majority failed the most basic test of leadership," Christie said Wednesday, as the new year dawned, "and they did so with callous disregard to the people of my state."
Except the Sandy bill wasn't just about providing relief to directly impacted areas such as New Jersey and Staten Island.
Democrats had expanded the legislation during a markup to include not only areas affected by Sandy, but also to provide money for all "storm events that occurred in 2012 along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast within the boundaries of the North Atlantic and Mississippi Valley divisions of the Corps that were affected by Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac."
This was done to get red state Republican senators from Alabama, Texas and Mississippi on board, old-fashion vote-buying.
Matt Mayer of the conservative Heritage Foundation slammed the request as an "enormous Christmas gift worth of stuff," and indeed it is. As Heritage reports, the estimate of insured losses from Sandy comes in around $20 billion, only one-third the request.
To start, the relief bill provides some $28 billion for future "disaster-mitigation" projects — spending that at the least is not a middle-of-the-night emergency.
The bill also allocates $100 million for the repair of all 265 Head Start centers around the country. Some Head Start centers in the New York-New Jersey area may have sustained some hurricane damage. But this is, again, a huge cash infusion to the $8 billion a year day-care program that exploits a tragedy.
Then there's more than $8 million to buy cars and equipment for the Homeland Security and Justice departments, $150 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dole out to fisheries in Alaska and $2 million for the Smithsonian Institution to repair museum roofs in Washington, D.C.
The bill also includes $207 million for the VA Manhattan Medical Center; $41 million to fix up eight military bases along the storm's path, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; $4 million for repairs at Kennedy Space Center in Florida; $3.3 million for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center of New York; and $1.1 million to repair national cemeteries.
Just which of these is a house-on-fire emergency, Gov. Christie?
Heritage's Patrick Louis Knudsen adds that "there is the truly audacious $17 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds, an embarrassingly transparent slush fund."
So how much do the actual victims of Sandy get to fix homes and rebuild their lives? Not much.
Christie should direct his outrage over the "selfishness and duplicity," not at the GOP House and its leadership, but at the Democrats who loaded it up with an assortment of earmarked pork on the theory that a devastating hurricane is a spending opportunity that should not be wasted.
Read More At IBD:
Speaker John Boehner Delays Pork-Laden Superstorm Sandy Relief Bill - Investors.com
