Hurricane Sandy a grim reminder of Republicans playing politics with disaster relief

Romney and Ryan, disaster privateers. This morning's powerful editorial in The New York Times, A Big Storm Requires Big Government, provides a brief history of FEMA and the reminder of the Republican party's history of turning disaster relief into a political football.

It's an absurd notion, but it's fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen. [...]

Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA's budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. [...]

It's all true. And even worse than the Times had room to detail. For instance, remember that Majority Leader Eric Cantor insisted last year that any increase in disaster aid funding had to come from cutting funds for equipping and training first responders by 40 percent. House Republicans nearly forced a government shutdown over disaster aid funding. They succeeded in forcing massive cuts to the program, passing a $2.65 billion bill for the disaster relief fund for the year, when the need is closer to $12 billion, annually. That's based on the average year, the average need. Hurricane Sandy is likely to blow that figure to smithereens.

Republicans have taken disaster relief hostage for the past two years, insisting like Mitt Romney that it's more appropriate for the states, already financially strapped and facing further cuts in federal aid, to take the lead in responding.

Like Mitt Romney, they pretend that it's about the deficit. They preach, like Romney did in a primary debate, that it's "immoral" to spend this money now and pass the debt on to future generations. They ignore the fact that it's at least as immoral to pass on to our children a crumbling and dysfunctional infrastructure that they'll have to figure out how to rebuild.

All of this so that they can force their real goal, explained by Romney in that debate:
"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better." And if your campaign contributors and political cronies can make a tidy profit off of the nation's misery, you've done your job.