Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to hold a vote on disaster relief this week, before Congress leaves Thursday mid-day on a 10-day break for Memorial Day. The House has passed two versions McConnell could choose from, one that includes $14 billion passed in January and another with $19 billion sent over in the last few weeks. But a big, fat, orange hurdle remains.
Donald Trump has refused to accept any additional disaster relief for Puerto Rico, still recovering from 2017's Hurricane Maria. In fact, there's still $8.2 billion in already appropriated money for Puerto Rico sitting on the shelf that Trump hasn't allowed to be spent. The unspent funding includes another $4 billion that hasn't been dispersed to Texas, $448 million for Florida, and $35 million for Georgia. While the administration is withholding Puerto Rico's funding out of sheer spite, it's probably just rank incompetence accounting for the rest. Republicans senators from disaster-struck states are getting a little testy about it all. "Now it's time for Congress to pass the disaster relief bill," Florida's Sen. Rick Scott said Sunday. "Our Panhandle communities have waited long enough."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that the House would work with the Senate this week to add additional money for humanitarian relief at the border. That potential deal depends on the Trump administration and Trump himself and whether he'd use the money intended for food and medical assistance and housing on enforcement and deportations and the wall. It also would mean pushing the spending bill over $20 billion and Republicans hate spending any extra money on anything that would help people in other states, and particularly brown people.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican in charge of the Appropriations Committee admitted as much last week, following a meeting McConnell had with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House puppet master Mick Mulvaney. "A lot of the emphasis was on spending caps because we're looking at disaster, we've been playing with that too long, and if we finish this we've got to go to approps, which is much bigger." Meaning whatever they spend to help people in disaster relief will become an issue in separate budget talks, with the White House trying to take money away from helping people down the road.
In the meantime, while these negotiations play out, McConnell isn't going to waste any time. He'll still be operating the unqualified judge conveyor belt, pushing through more judges over the opposition of the American Bar Associations, the Democratic home state senators of these people, and the ghosts of the writers of the constitution.