In case you missed it over the weekend, several papers ran stories detailing the reaction from Republicans in Congress to President Bush’s attempt to sell them out over domestic security funding.
To review, Bush told the nation’s governors a couple of weeks ago that he really wanted to increase funding to the states to help defray the costs of beefing up domestic security, money many municipalities desperately want, but he couldn’t because the congressional GOP decided to shortchange local governments. It was a startling, almost breathtaking, attempt to shift the blame to leaders of his own party for his own failures to follow through on promises made after the attacks of 9/11.
Late last week, in a letter leaked to the New York Times, House Republicans responded in kind.
Rep. C. W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, wrote to the White House on Friday to explain that the president’s claims were “factually inaccurate.” (Nice to see a Republican getting frustrated at the president’s tendency to say things that aren’t true.)
In specific, Young responded to Bush’s claim that the administration asked for a $3.5 billion budget for domestic security, only to see it reduced to $1.3 billion by the GOP in Congress. Not so, said Young, who explained that the spending bill passed by the House, signed happily by Bush without criticism, allocated over $3.4 billion to support the “first responder community.”
Moreover, Young noted, if the White House was so “disappointed” by Congress’ spending decisions (to use the president’s choice of words), why didn’t Tom Ridge, Bush’s secretary of homeland security who was involved with crafting the budget, object during the process?
If this weren’t so serious an issue, it would be fairly comical to see a Republican White House and a Republican Congress feud over who was responsible for screwing up necessary funding to protect Americans on U.S. soil. Both sides agree the funding bill was “inadequate” — proving that Democrats were right to be criticizing the insufficient expenditure for such a critically important need — but both sides say the other is to blame.
Didn’t Bush promise his presidency would usher in a new “era of responsibility”?