Christie: Cruz is a hypocrite over Harvey relief

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday slammed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a hypocrite for seeking aid for Texas when he was unwilling to support a similar effort in the Northeast in 2012.

Cruz told MSNBC earlier this week that he had voted against the Hurricane Sandy relief bill because it was “full of pork” and that he had always “enthusiastically supported hurricane relief for Sandy.” Christie, in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said Cruz had been “playing politics” with his Sandy vote. Asked to play a quick-word association game with Cruz's name, the governor quickly responded "crap."


“He talks about playing politics. That's what he did with people's lives in 2012 and 2013. He was playing politics to make himself try to look like the most conservative guy in town,” the New Jersey governor said. “This is why politics have become so cynical in Washington, is statements like that. He should just stand up now and say ‘You know what? I was wrong. I was wrong in 2012. It was the wrong thing to do, and now I hope that the people of New Jersey and New York are willing to let bygones be bygones and vote for relief for Texas.’”

Cruz, who spoke to reporters Wednesday morning at Houston's George R. Brown Convention Center, currently hosting thousands of evacuees, disputed Christie's accusation and accused the governor of taking advantage of hurricane recovery efforts in Houston to seek the spotlight and lob political attacks.

“I’m sorry that there are politicians who are really desperate to get their names in the news and are saying whatever they need to do that. We have a crisis on the ground of people who are hurting right now. People who are in harm’s way, whose lives and families are in jeopardy as we speak. And I’ll tell you, my focus, and I wish the focus of others, would be on saving the lives that are being threatened," the senator said. "For folks who are focused on raising political shots and snipes about the Sandy bill, facts matter. And the fact is that the Sandy bill was over $50 billion, and 70 percent of it was not emergency funding. Only 30 percent of the funding was emergency funding."

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are expected to work on relief legislation to aid Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated parts of the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, dropping record amounts of rain on the Houston area and triggering historic levels of flooding.

Hurricane Sandy hit the New York and New Jersey coastlines in October 2012, just days before that year’s presidential election. Christie, who was acting at the time as a top surrogate for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in addition to his gubernatorial duties, famously met with then-President Barack Obama during a tour of the devastated areas of New Jersey.

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In his explanation of his 2013 vote, delivered Monday from a shelter in his hometown of Houston, Cruz said he had voted against the Sandy relief bill because two-thirds of the legislation “had nothing to do with Sandy.” A Washington Post fact check of Cruz’s statement found that the Sandy bill was not, in fact, packed with pork unrelated to the storm, rating the senator’s comment three “Pinocchios” out of a possible four.

Asked about Cruz’s specific figure, that two-thirds of the spending in the bill was unrelated to Sandy, Christie said the senator “just made it up. Ted’s particularly good at that. He just made it up. You know it and I know it. He made it up because it sounded good.”

“The disgraceful part of that, the truly disgraceful part of what we just saw, was that he's not telling the truth, standing in a recovery center where people are suffering, and it's just not right,” the governor said.

