On Monday night with 14 members of the Senate absent, Republican senators denied cloture for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's $7 billion relief package for disaster aid, refusing to allow the bill through unless the spending was offset by cuts elsewhere. This morning, however, a full Senate finally passed the cloture vote, 61-38.
And now it faces a hostile Republican-controlled House, with Majority Leader Eric Cantor still lying through his teeth about the willingness of Republicans to take another hostage.
Despite allegations from both Democrats and Republicans that Cantor is holding disaster relief funding hostage to extract further spending reductions, Cantor asserted yesterday at the American Action Forum in Washington D.C. that "no one" is holding any disaster relief funding “hostage”:
CANTOR: It's important to get relief to the people who need it. No one is holding any money hostage. I also think we can do it in a responsible way.
Mere hours before his comments, however, Senate Republicans did just that, filibustering a $7 billion disaster relief package in the Senate because it did not contain spending offsets. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) last week told reporters, "We have got to find a way to pay for these things," and other Republican senators said they wouldn’t support a plan without offsets.
Asked why the GOP would oppose that funding, Cantor explained that the party was blocking those funds both on procedural grounds and because the cuts had not been offset, saying lawmakers should "responsibly" approve the funding.
Responsibly approving funding, in Cantor-speak, undoubtedly means doing something like cutting millions of people off food assistance, or Medicaid. It certainly doesn't mean raising taxes on the people in his bracket, or curtailing spending for defense contractors.
Good luck with that one, Cantor. It'll go over real well with America. In the CNN poll [PDF], Jed Lewison wrote about earlier, they also asked if disaster funding should be offset by other cuts. By a wide margin, 59 to 38 percent, Americans say take care of the disasters, deficit be damned.