Hurricane Ian Showcases GOP’s Disaster Aid Hypocrisy

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/hurricane-ian-showcases-gops-disaster-aid-hypocrisy

The conflict between lawmakers’ public promises to help the storm’s victims—and their own commitment to blocking or reducing the scope of that help—would be just the latest instance of the congressional GOP trying to have it both ways when it comes to disaster relief.

In the last decade, congressional Republicans have made it a key principle that disaster aid bills be “fiscally responsible” while applying that principle in conspicuously uneven ways.

Funding disaster relief packages, like funding the government, was once considered a noncontroversial and nonpartisan duty for Congress. But amid the Tea Party’s rise, a crop of new, hard-right Republicans began to see opportunity in leveraging these bills as a way to communicate their conservative bona fides to the party base.