These Mtn Republicans Abandoned Their Constituents

 

There have been three pieces of law aimed (more or less) at hurricane recovery passed by the Republican super-majorities in the NC state Senate and House. 

1. A “first step” relief bill passed the General Assembly just two weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated much of Western North Carolina. It provided around $270 million in aid, mostly to state agencies.

2. Two weeks after that, a second relief bill added around $600 million in new aid. Notably, "the bill did not include any direct grants to affected businesses that were underwater with COVID-era SBA loans" -- businesses unable to raise cash because of property loss and the cancellation of the Fall tourist season. (Cory Vaillancourt)

l to r, Gillespie, Clampitt, Pless

The pressure for more relief from the state's House and Senate quickly built. The state’s budget director Kristin Walker estimated $53.6 billion in damages across 39 federally declared disaster counties. Gov. Cooper proposed taking $3.9 billion from the “Rainy Day Fund,” including $475 million in grants for small businesses that were (and still are) drowning. Cooper was ignored. 

Instead, the bosses in the General Assembly came up with the massive garbage of S 382, "Disaster Relief 3/Budget/Various Law Changes," which contained only a promise of future appropriations for hurricane relief but no actual money, while its real purpose was to take away power from the governor and other state-wide Council of State members after they were elected but not yet in office. The rainy day fund stayed sacrosanct and very dry. So Gov. Cooper vetoed the monstrocity. Budget Director Kristin Walker had testified in a House hearing just prior to the veto-override vote in the House that the state had $9.1 billion "unappropriated in reserves across a variety of accounts," and that Gov. Cooper's suggestion of $3.9 billion for hurricane relief would still leave a very comfortable $5.5 billion in reserve.

No dice. The NCGOP wanted to cripple Democrats more than it wanted to help its own citizens.

We've written here about the three Republican House members who initially defied their caucus and voted against S 382 and who almost immediately a few days later reversed themselves and voted to ignore the pleas of their constituents. Reps. Mike Clampitt, Karl Gillespie, and Mark Pless abandoned their supposed principles and voted to make the sham disaster relief bill an official slap in the face for their drowned counties.

They're not the only Republicans representing Western North Carolina in the House. At least three other of those guys happily voted yes on the first passage of S 382, for whatever self-serving rationalizations they made for not actually appropriating any new direct aid for their counties:

Jake Johnson (Dist. 113). Youngest Republican in Raleigh and Majority Deputy Whip. Rather than working to get more direct money appropriated for Helene relief, whippersnapper Johnson took the opportunity to criticize the Cooper admin's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for -- get this -- enforcing river set-backs for rebuilding disappeared infrastructure: "Where a lot of the rebuilding is going to have to be done — and a lot of the cleanup, obviously, is near the river — one thing we need to look at is, you know, at least temporarily suspending some of the [regulations], how close you can work to a river and making sure that, you know, they're not cracking down on that," Johnson told Fox News Digital.

Ray Pickett

Ray Pickett (Dist. 93). Putting his "followship" skills on full display, Pickett echoed Johnson, tagged along with Johnson's opportunistic attack on DEQ, though his "me too" and "I was just going to say that too" came without any mention of "a specific policy he was most concerned about but said he was [vaguely] worried about DEQ's permitting and approvals process in general .... I absolutely share those concerns," Pickett told Fox News Digital. "I see it with some of our infrastructure that's going to have to be replaced. DEQ … has not always been the quickest agency we have." This was all tough-guy posturing against an environmental agency that had not, in fact, been any impediment at all to recovery but had rather been on the scene in the West since the middle of the flood.

Dudley Greene (Dist. 85). New in the House, representing hard-hit Avery, Mitchell, Yancey, and McDowell counties. He's mere furniture and does as he's told by the bosses.