BATON ROUGE, Louisiana – The Los Angeles Times is politicizing natural disaster relief for the thousands of flooding victims by attacking Republican lawmakers who represent the state.
The LA Times piece noted how House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) were opposed to the $50.5 billion relief package for Hurricane Sandy victims, blasting the three lawmakers as “likely exemplars” of politicians who only care about their district.
“They’re all likely exemplars of another Washington truism: fiscal responsibility is great, until it’s your own district that’s getting fiscally hammered,” the LA Times piece reads. “Then Job One becomes working to “help the residents of the threatened areas in their time of need.”
“No one is saying that the flood-stricken communities of Louisiana don’t deserve all the assistance that the U.S. government can provide them,” the write-up continues. “But so did the residents of the Sandy zone. How do the lawmakers’ 2013 votes to deny relief to those Northeast communities square with their demand for emergency flood assistance now?”
Initial relief to Louisiana flood victims and the supplemental Hurricane Sandy relief are two entirely different matters, however, which the LA Times mentions, citing that Scalise and Cassidy mostly opposed massive relief packages without a 1.63 percent cut to discretionary programs.
Scalise, Cassidy and Fleming, like other Republican lawmakers at the time, also disapproved of the use of Sandy relief funding as a gateway to pork barrel spending, as Breitbart News reported.
That pork barrel spending included “$500 million for weather forecasting and to help create an ocean zoning plan-the later one of Obama’s pet projects. Also included are $10 million for FBI salaries $2 billion for road construction across the country, as well as funding for the Head Start program, roof repairs at the Smithsonian, and $150 million for fisheries across the country,” as reported by Human Events.
Another $16 billion within the Sandy relief package was dedicated for the “Community Development Block Grant, a slush fund that states and localities can hand out pretty much anywhere they choose,” the Heritage Foundation found.
But, the LA Times did not acknowledge this bloated spending disguised as Sandy relief funding in their attack on the GOP lawmakers, instead writing that they “are also climate change deniers, a sign that they’re unable to process evidence in front of their own eyes.”
John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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