It’s textbook hypocrisy: House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday that he won’t commit to reconvening his chamber to pass additional disaster-relief funding, yet he criticizes the federal government’s response as lacking.
“We’ll be back in session immediately after the election,” Johnson said, after refusing to commit to bringing House members back to vote.
“That’s 30 days from now. The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that,” Johnson said, adding that it takes time to figure out “specific needs and requests based upon the actual damages.”
Johnson also recently railed against Biden’s response thus far, noting that lawmakers released $20 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds last month. “[Biden and Harris] are scrambling to cover their egregious errors and mistakes,” the Louisiana Republican told Fox News Digital on Friday. “And there’s an effort to blame others or blame circumstances when this is just purely a lack of leadership and response.”
However, the Department of Homeland Security says FEMA will run out of funding before the end of the hurricane season.
Johnson’s hypocrisy comes amid the right spreading conspiracy theories about FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene—conspiracies that even Republican governors, state officials, state government websites, and FEMA itself have had to debunk. These false claims have not only confused the public but also put unnecessary pressure on local leaders and military personnel working tirelessly to support their communities in the wake of this disaster.
Johnson’s choice to sit on his hands over more FEMA funding follows President Joe Biden highlighting the urgency of the moment. In a letter on Friday, Biden urged Congress to reconvene for more FEMA funding.
“[W]hile FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund has the resources it requires right now to meet immediate needs, the fund does face a shortfall at the end of the year,” he wrote. “Without additional funding, FEMA would be required to forego longer-term recovery activities in favor of meeting urgent needs. The Congress should provide FEMA additional resources to avoid forcing that kind of unnecessary trade-off and to give the communities we serve the certainty of knowing that help will be ongoing, both for the short- and long-term.”
During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, lawmakers quickly came together to adopt an additional $52 billion in disaster-relief funding. However, the Congress of today is not the same as the Congress of nearly 20 years ago, of course. It is now far more partisan than ever before.
Meanwhile, as GOP members try to score political points, over 200,000 homes are without power in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia as of Monday afternoon. And millions of people across the southeastern U.S. grapple with the devastation from Helene. At least 230 people have died.
As if it couldn’t get any worse, Hurricane Milton was upgraded to a Category 5 on Monday and is expected to hit the Gulf Coast of Florida on Wednesday. And on Monday, Biden made it clear in a statement that he was anticipating the expected needs of the region:
The reluctance of House GOP leadership to return to Washington, D.C., to pass additional disaster relief reflects Republicans valuing their partisan agendas over the urgent needs of their constituents.
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