Sen. Dick Durbin (John Gress/Reuters)
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senate Majority Whip, says that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's plan to only pay for disaster relief following Hurricane Irene with spending cuts elsewhere would be
"impossible" for Congress to implement.
Speaking on the Senate floor, Durbin referenced comments from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has said Congress would make cuts to pay for disaster relief.
"Some members of Congress, one a congressman from Virginia, have suggested that we can take the need for disaster funds out of the regular budget of the United States," he said. "I will tell you that it is virtually impossible, and we don't know what the final cost will be."
Durbin argued that insurance experts and others are predicting an increase in costly natural disasters, making it hard to budget for these events. He said the U.S. has already had a record 10 natural disasters in 2011 that cost more than $1 billion in damages, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was already known to be $2 to $4 billion short of funding, even before Hurricane Irene struck the east coast.[...]
"In other words, we can't budget for these disasters," Durbin said. "We're going to have to get together on a bipartisan basis to deal with this."
That's why disaster relief has always been included in "emergency" appropriations, because you can't budget ahead of time for a natural disaster. And certainly you can't do it in the middle of both hurricane season and wildfire season. The only thing you can do, which Cantor seems entirely comfortable with, is respond until the money runs out. That's essentially their approach to any kind of domestic spending, and the impetus behind things like block granting Medicaid or letting unemployment compensation run out. Here's a little bit of money to deal with your "emergency," and once it's gone you have to sink or swim on your own.
Now war and the defense contracts that go with it have been funded by emergency supplements, so that funding counts as emergencies, apparently. The moneybags for that are bottomless.