Sometimes the Republicans just gift wrap an issue with a silver bow and everyone needs to drop everything and turn this gift into a poster and plaster it everywhere.
Eric Cantor gave us such a gift when he said that federal hurricane relief expenditures had to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.
Cantor’s position is more of the Republicans’ hostage-taking strategy, but this time they’ve chosen a hostage almost no one is willing to let die. There is no need to even poll on the issue. Outside of a hard-core, rightwing radical fringe, there is absolutely no one who believes that we should settle on spending cuts before we either respond to ongoing natural disasters or decide on how to respond to future ones. Although there is a real debate about the role of government in this country, the overwhelming American consensus is that the government should respond swiftly and massively to any natural disaster. If there’s a tradeoff between American lives and American dollars, Americans happily chose to save lives. That is what it means to be an American. The American people also don’t care whether the assistance is local, state, federal or extra-terrestrial; they simply want it to work. George Bush learned this the hard way during Katrina. While his presidency was already wounded, Katrina destroyed any hope he had to regain decent approval rating
In short, this is the perfect example of the kind of hostage Republicans should be totally unwilling to take. But they made the threat and they shouldn’t be able to just take it back when the ploy goes south. Instead, we need to make absolutely clear: Republicans in Congress are willing to put lives at risk to get their way. Say it again. Republicans are willing to put lives at risk to get their way. Katrina crystalized the problems with incompetent leadership. This crisis should show what happens when we have heartless leadership. We can also take advantage of the Fox machine. Eric Cantor is not some crank. Like Paul Ryan, he is protected by the Republican noise machine. This means that as we ramp up our attacks on him, we can provoke rally ‘round Cantor screeds on the part of Fox commentators defending what is indefensible. They’re unlikely to acknowledge that one of their heroes made a mistake, or went too far. This can work to our advantage by keeping the story going as long as possible. We want this to be a story until at least the Republican debate on September 7th; a question to all the candidates on whether federal disaster relief spending has to be matched by concomitant spending cuts would be a godsend.
The major point is this can’t be a two-day story. It needs to be hammered home that refusing to fund disaster response is a direct consequence of Republican governance. Sometimes it is hard to explain the consequences of Republican policies, this time it is easy. We can’t let this drop. Republicans need to be punished for this attempted hostage taking in a way that makes them think twice about trying to take hostages again.