Hurricane Sandy has come and gone and I am safe and sound here in coastal New York, still with electric power and a working telephone, missing cable television service but connected to the outside world via the internet. Considering the tremendous wind and water damage all around me and the tragic death toll, I am quite lucky and truly grateful.
From the White House, President Obama has been coordinating storm response from the White House. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has been dodging questions about his primary campaign call to cut funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
At a campaign rally in Kettering, Ohio, that was hastily repurposed as a hurricane relief event but nonetheless opened – incredibly, if not surprisingly - with a Romney biographical video, the candidate didn’t respond to what press accounts have reported were 14 direct questions about FEMA funding.
It was a typically tortured answer from Romney at one of the Republican primary debates earlier this year behind the barrage of questions, when he included FEMA in a federalist argument about devolving funding and power to the states, specifically with regard to disaster relief. “Absolutely,” he said when asked if he’d support shutting the agency down and having the states handle emergency relief on their own.
"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.”
Whether Romney really would defund FEMA as president is uncertain, and probably unlikely. We all know Romney works hard at not saying what he means or meaning what he says. Most likely he was simply doing what he does instinctively—pandering to a particular audience to win a few more votes.
The response to Hurricane Sandy demonstrates why the federal government must be involved in disaster relief, particularly when our country is hit with a massive natural disaster that does crosses state lines.
Staunch Romney supporter Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, speaking on Tuesday morning’s “Today” show, had praise for Romney’s opponent:
“The federal government’s response has been great. I was on the phone at midnight again last night with the president, personally. He has expedited the designation of New Jersey as a major disaster area… The president has been outstanding in this. The folks at FEMA, Craig Fugate, and his folks have been excellent.”
That’s the purpose of FEMA, and, truth be told, one of the purposes of a national government: to help our states and our citizens recover from disasters that they could not afford to handle by themselves. Conservative ideologues may want to believe they built everything themselves, but they sure aren’t equipped to fix everything themselves.
Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal called for disaster relief funding to “be fully offset within the discretionary levels provided in this resolution.” Put simply, whenever a disaster occurs and the federal government steps into help, the cost of the response would be required to be met with cuts in other nondefense discretionary budget items. President Obama and the Democrats have vigorously opposed such a system.
All responsible citizens should oppose such a system. Disaster relief is an essential role of the federal government. Hamstringing this role in ideological debates is only courting further disaster (can you imagine Halliburton in a privatized emergency relief role?) and reflects the degree to which Republicans have become frighteningly isolated from reality.
It also exposes the dangerous corner into which candidates like Mitt Romney paint themselves when they stoop to pander to the ideologues.