Lower Manhattan, and the hundreds of thousands of people who live in it, didn’t have to go without power for days after the superstorm Sandy hit. Businesses there didn’t have to close; millions of dollars didn’t have to be lost. But all of that did happen, because at some point someone decided that, on a relatively small island packed with people, a key power station should be located a couple hundred feet from a river, and until the folly of that decision was quite literally made brilliantly clear, it seemed foolish—too difficult, too expensive—to move it.

The N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center didn’t need to be evacuated. Two hundred patients, some of them seriously ill, didn’t need to be carried down multiple flights of stairs—with workers breathing manually for some of them, including babies, as David Remnick reported at the time—in order to get them out of a hospital without power and running water. Bellevue Hospital Center didn’t need to be evacuated either. But both were, because, though they have their generators on their roofs, as they’re supposed to, key parts of their backup power systems were in their basements, where flooding could put them out of commission, and until Sandy proved that they had to be moved it seemed too costly to do so.

There are any number of decisions like this, decisions that, in the clearness of hindsight, seem stupid; there are tragedies and SNAFUs that we now know could have been avoided. But there are, as Eric Klinenberg documents in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, things that cities like New York can do to at least partially “climate-proof” themselves and mitigate the damage caused by natural disasters. The problem is that those things are expensive, and they require vision. And as House Republicans proved this week, there’s a dangerous lack of that in American politics today.

“Anyone from New York or New Jersey who contributes one penny to congressional Republicans is out of their minds. Because what they did last night was put a knife in the back of New Yorkers and New Jerseyans. It was an absolute disgrace,” Peter King, who is himself a congressional Republican—he represents part of Long Island in the House—said on Wednesday.

King was talking about the House’s failure to hold a vote on, much less pass, a sixty-billion-dollar package of aid to the victims of Sandy that had already been approved by the Senate, meaning that the bill will die when the current Congress does, later this week, and will have to be redone after the new Congress convenes.

Later in the day, he was joined in his righteous anger by another member of the Grand Old Party, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who railed against some of the Republicans in the House, especially Speaker John Boehner. He called them “know-nothings,”; said, “They’re always bickering about something and not getting something done”; complained, “There is no reason at the moment to believe anything they tell me.”

King and Christie are right to be angry. But it’s not like this is an aberration for today’s Republican Party.

That the House didn’t deal with the bill before the end of the hundred and twelfth Congress is a matter of incompetence and, perhaps, a lack of empathy for those who suffered as a result of Sandy. It’s not likely to help Republicans get past the difficulties they’ve been having convincing voters that they care about regular people. But the immediate problem—that the bill hasn’t been passed, and needs to be—can be addressed within a few days, or a few weeks, and it most likely will be. Once that’s done, though, a key underlying issue will remain unresolved, and will continue to pose a far greater threat to King and Christie’s constituents than simple incompetence ever could.

House Republicans didn’t simply forget about the Sandy-relief legislation in the excitement of the fiscal-cliff deal. The bill stalled and died because many of them—joined by key conservative activists and think tanks—flat out opposed the version the Senate passed. They opposed it because, they said, half—or more—of the sixty billion dollars of funding contained in the bill was what they called “pork.” A more accurate term would be “foresight.” The legislation might not have paid, specifically, for the ConEd station to be moved, or the hospitals’ backup power systems to be consolidated, but it would have paid for other kinds of forward-thinking measures, and that was the funding conservatives had a problem with.

The conservatives’ plan was to split the Senate’s legislation in two, with one half, totalling twenty-seven billion dollars, being passed by the hundred and twelfth Congress, leaving the remaining thirty-three billion to be either added on to the House bill as an amendment or to be considered and passed—perhaps in whole, perhaps in part, or perhaps not at all, by the hundred and thirteenth. (As a result of the pressure from King and others, the new House will reportedly hold a vote on Friday on a bill that includes nine billion dollars of funding, with the leftover fifty-one billion dollars coming to the floor on January 15th. These numbers weren’t arbitrary; the twenty-seven billion was, the critics of the Senate’s version have said, money that would actually be used for, generally speaking, emergency spending and immediate relief. The rest would either go toward repairing federal assets affected by the storm or to efforts aimed at preventing the kind of damage that Sandy caused from happening in the future. In an issue brief written for the Heritage Foundation, Matt A. Mayer neatly summed up the conservative position on this score:

The Obama Administration requests roughly $28 billion for future disaster-mitigation projects on the East Coast. Setting aside whether these projects have merit, a supplemental spending request to deal with a current crisis is not the appropriate vehicle to propose new spending projects. If the Obama Administration believes that these future projects should be funded, it should place those funding requests in the upcoming budget.

On the surface, this seems like a compelling argument: of course funding for the future can wait for a little bit, and it makes sense for Congress to take as much time as is necessary to get it right, to make sure that money does what it’s intended to do and that it isn’t wasted. But conservatives—like those in the House, and at Heritage—have made sure that things aren’t so simple. The funding for future disaster-mitigation projects needs to be in an immediate-relief bill because that’s the only way it’ll get passed.