A levee gets breached by the raging Arkansas River near Dardanelle.
Inevitably, a political commentator's thoughts turn to the pride of Dardanelle, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton.
More specifically, thoughts turn to Cotton's five votes in 2013, during his lone House term warming up for the Senate, against supplemental appropriations for Hurricane Sandy relief in New York City and elsewhere on the East Coast.
I do not allege hypocrisy by the young senator, who now floods social media--as he should--with offers to assist constituents sustaining damages from this epic river event and needing guidance in federal agencies and programs.
For that matter, we must take note that Cotton voted quietly a couple of weeks ago for a $19 billion disaster relief bill that contained money specifically to rebuild levees. The bill has now passed and is on the way to the president. Maybe Cotton is growing in the job, at least regarding disaster aid.
He says the current bill was not larded with pork as the Sandy bill was. I say we should count ourselves lucky that Cotton didn't object to any line within the current bill, in which case we could presume he would have voted against us in the same way he voted against the East Coast in 2013.
I seek only to make a timely reminder of Cotton's outrage of 2013 because it's important to understand what made his action then outrageous.
I don't believe Cotton ever really opposed help to those in need from Sandy. I merely think he was behaving with political cynicism, voting against five Sandy-related spending measures only because he was free to do so knowing the emergency spending would pass otherwise.
There was no consequence, either in human terms for sufferers or political terms for himself. He wasn't voting against Arkansas, but New York and New Jersey, mainly. And we don't seem to like those places much down here, for some reason.
Thus, Cotton had a chance to engage in idle posturing. And he shamelessly took it.
Cotton obliged his arch-conservative benefactors such as the Koch brothers, the Club for Growth and the Tea Party, who don't much believe in government solutions.
Alone even in Arkansas' wholly conservative House delegation in 2013, Cotton voted against every Sandy relief measure in sight. He did so on the basis that each was tainted with expenditures exceeding the directly human ones and extending to indirect needs--"pork" he called it.
He was disapproving of Amtrak repair, roof-patching on a Smithsonian museum, seawall fortification at a national wildlife refuge to protect from future storms, anti-erosion efforts at Cape Canaveral, and aid to Head Start because scores of Head Start facilities had been damaged along the coast.
Those kinds of add-ons exploited a disaster and represented the very problem with government spending, Cotton said.
But responsible legislating requires occasional concession to objectionable matters in order to attend to real need. Any legislator worth his salt will have voted from time to time for a bill he found imperfect and done so in service to the greater need.
For that matter, there is nothing legitimately offensive or objectionable about fixing a wind-damaged museum roof or repairing flood-damaged rail facilities or fortifying the seawall of a federal wildlife refuge. In fact, that's effective legislating.
No one was trying to pull a fast one. The idea was to take advantage of the opportunity, not to self-serve, but to meet a few needs, and to do so openly.
When you're nearing $20 trillion in government debt, as was the case in 2013, it seems odd to draw the line at patching a roof or repairing a flooded Amtrak stop.
The federal government's deficit and debt do not stem from attending to a supplemental smattering of indirect needs in a disaster relief bill. They stem from Republican tax cuts for the rich, lavishly non-strategic defense spending and unreformed health-care costs driving the entitlement liability.
Absent tax cuts, and with a few targeted tax increases and spending discipline, Bill Clinton's presidency produced a surplus, even while attending without controversy to natural disasters under the widely hailed leadership at FEMA of James Lee Witt, also from near Dardanelle.
Barack Obama's administration necessarily ran the deficit way up, nearly to $1.5 trillion, for a one-time stimulus for an economy that the George W. Bush administration had ruined. Then, over the ensuing seven years, Obama brought the annual deficit down nearly a trillion bucks to $500 billion to $600 billion, even while patching roofs.
Now Cotton and President Trump and the Republicans are running that deficit back up to a trillion dollars this year.
That's what the cynical politics of penny wisdom and pound foolishness will get you.
But at least Cotton was right on disaster relief this time.
He wouldn't want to have voted against levee rebuilding two weeks before a levee got washed over in his hometown.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/05/2019