The victims of the tragic Joplin tornado have been so overwhelmed with donations of food and clothing from around that the state and nation that they are asking people to hold off their generosity for the moment. Donors certainly should continue to provide cash support to the relief organizations that are helping the city recover.
But the bigger issue going forward is how much financial help the federal government should be providing.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor caused quite a stir Monday with a stunningly heartless statement that any help for Joplin would have to be offset by cuts elsewhere in federal spending. Mind you, Cantor didn’t simply refrain from waiting until the search for missing people was over to say this: His cruelty came less than 24 hours after the tragedy, at a point when rescue workers were just beginning to search the rubble for survivors.
This evoked some pretty colorful responses.
Traditionally, the immediate aftermath of tragedies are politics-free zones, but Cantor’s commitment to his anti-spending dogma outweighed any concern there might be for the messy little details of the carnage and suffering a thousand miles from his district.
This also didn’t play well in Missouri. Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill blasted Cantor for his insensitivity, and even Republican Sen. Roy Blunt—to whom Cantor served as deputy when he was House majority whip—had to distance himself from the statement.
Today, Blunt called for a larger-than-usual federal outlay for Joplin, a position seemingly justified by the historic scope of the damage. With a mounting death toll already at 125, this was Joplin’s Hurricane Katrina, proportionally similar to the horror that befell New Orleans in 2005. (Joplin was roughly a tenth of the size that New Orleans was, and so was the death toll).
For all of its noble efforts to recover, New Orleans has been downsized by nearly 30 percent by Katrina, and it’s hard to imagine that a similar long-term fate won’t befall Joplin, which had a huge swath of its city annihilated in the tornado. Blunt is right in arguing that this is an exceptional case.
That said, the call for federal help certainly doesn’t square with the basic philosophy of one of Blunt’s key constituencies: the Tea Party. This is domestic federal spending for a purpose that—like health care, for instance—was not mentioned at all in the U.S. Constitution.
Somehow, the Founding Fathers, who undoubtedly had to endure the ravages of Mother Nature with much less technology at their disposal, still failed to contemplate a federal-government role in disaster relief. In the parlance of the Tea Party, Blunt’s compassionate call for federal aid is pure socialism.
As if that weren’t awkward enough, the worst tornado in more than half a century in one of (if not the worst) tornado seasons on record might cry out for a reasoned discussion of how much this—along with earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis—are related to climate change. Don’t expect this to be embraced by another key right-wing constituency, the climate-change deniers, who continue to resist any serious attempt to recognize the problem.
When milquetoast USA Today compares your “movement” to the birthers, you know you’re in trouble.
For those contemplating the notion of a big-picture view of what might be done to reduce the likelihood of tragedies like the one that befell Joplin, there’s this or this or this.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary By Ray Hartmann
