As Hurricane Helene careened toward Florida’s Panhandle, numerous Republicans voted against extending funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Last week, Congress approved $20 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund as part of a stopgap spending bill to fund the government through December 20. But the measure left out billions of dollars in requested supplemental disaster funding.
The Senate approved the measure by a 78-18 vote on September 25 after it passed the House in a 341-82 vote. Republicans supplied the no votes in both chambers.
Some of the Republicans who voted against the bill represent states that have been hard hit by Helene, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.
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That’s fair, I am but one among many. A lot of folks fail to realize that our perspectives don’t arise from a vacuum. As one example, fundamentalist Christian folks don’t hate trans folks because they just want to see them suffer, they hate them because they’ve been instructed by a malicious actor that their religion requires them to hate them and that they are a threat to public order. Ditto for a hundred other conflicts of opinion in modern America. We have been set against one another, set up like pawns across a chessboard. And those who fail to observe the bigger picture of the chessboard will be played like the pawns they’ve been cast as.
Everyone has a reason why they believe the things that they believe. Unfortunately it’s generally much easier to just discard that context, especially in a social media environment where that context is invisible and must be inferred, and the crowd is going to follow the path of least resistance generally speaking. I don’t know how to fix that.
