Wayne Parry/Associated Press

Republicans in Congress like to find ways to hold the economy, and ordinary Americans, hostage to their ideological agenda. Just as they are once again threatening another phony debt ceiling crisis that will jeopardize the nation’s credit rating, they are, once again, threatening to withhold vital funds for Hurricane Sandy relief unless the Democrats agree to unrelated spending cuts.

The White House has requested $60 billion in federal disaster relief to repair the damage caused by Sandy, but Republicans have balked. Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey called disaster relief “wasteful spending.” And four other right-wing Republicans told The Hill that they would demand cuts in other programs to offset the expense.



Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho said “We have these emergencies every year and we should prepare for that in our budget.” That’s reasonable, but rich. In Sept. 2011, Senate Democrats approved $6.9 billion to refill the disaster emergency fund and House Republicans cut that amount by nearly half. Not yet satisfied, they demanded $1 billion in offsetting cuts from a loan program to develop energy-efficient automobiles.

Only in the labyrinth of the right would it make sense to cut a long-term program to deal with the fact of climate change and its impact on the environment to pay for storm-related devastation that is one of the effects of global warming.

In the not-so distant past, serious people in Washington generally disapproved of using disaster relief as a bargaining chip in the battle over deficit reduction. Even the United States Chamber of Commerce has opposed that kind of horse trading.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Tom DeLay of Texas, who was then House Majority Leader, said it was “right to borrow” for the sake of disaster relief, and argued that offsets would hurt the very economy Republicans were trying to save.

You have to sink pretty low to generate nostalgia for the Tom DeLay era.