FEMA disaster
by digby
I so don't want to write about budget battles right now that I'm just going to farm this ridiculous FEMA fight out to people who have already done it. Here's dday:
This is about setting a precedent of offsetting disaster relief funding, and nothing else. Republicans want to design a system where, every time there’s a natural disaster, some unrelated program has to pay the price. Democrats what the system as it has worked for the history of the Republic: the federal government pays for the needs of those hit by a natural disaster without smacking unrelated budgets, because it’s the right thing to do. Republicans see this purely as a matter of spending more or spending less. Democrats see it as an issue of basic morality and fairness. Should the next Katrina be offset?
And it’s also about keeping promises. In fact, the debt limit deal allowed for disaster relief funding above the spending cap on discretionary spending. You can see this right on page 13 of the Budget Control Act. It’s in Congress-ese, but it basically says that Congress can go up to $11 billion beyond the spending cap on disaster relief funding.
Republicans might say that the deal allowed for FEMA funding above the cap, but it didn’t mandate it, and nothing says you CAN’T offset disaster relief, although the Act explicitly says you don’t have to. That’s pretty weak tea. Clearly the legislative intent was to allow a safety valve in the event of big natural disasters that required immediate relief. Republicans want to pretend that safety valve doesn’t exist.
This is a real cautionary tale. To my way of thinking it's clear that these jackasses have broken the Big Deal by doing this. FEMA was provided for in it and now they are insisting that there be offsets. I don't care what kind of slimy excuses they give, that's breaking the contract and that tells you everything you need to know about just how useful these idiotic grand bargains are going to be with these people. There has never been a bigger waste of time than signing agreements with people who have no intention of honoring them.
As Kevin Drum writes:
So while those offsets might be minor on their own merits, they're basically a bellwether: if tea partiers can force Democrats to cave in on that, they can force them to cave in on every other violation of normal procedure too. Agreements will become meaningless and the budgeting process will become almost literally a free-for-all. That's what this is all about.
Dday pointed out early on that the Democrats are aware of this and, in fact, dealt with it earlier in the FAA standoff. And they prevailed. It remains to be seen if they will this time. FEMA just announced this morning that they can scrape by for another couple of days before running out of money.
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