Silent on Harvey
What’s the point of our congressional delegation if they can’t help us rebuild?
Even the steady drip of a melting icicle is enough to fill Houstonians with a sense of dread in the months after Hurricane Harvey. Is that another leak? A harbinger of the next deluge?
Call it weather anxiety or flood trauma, but the sound of unrelenting rainfall and the cacophony of croaking frogs that resounded through the air during breaks in the historic flood still remain fixed in our collective consciousness, like memories of a schoolyard mockery from Mother Nature herself.
As the weeks after Harvey turn to months, however, the most frightening sound remains the silence.
The eerie stillness that now fills the thrice-flooded Meyerland neighborhood. The laconic stretches of bayou where heavy machinery — supposedly part of a floodprevention project — sit like statuary. The dead air in Washington.
How many times does a city have to flood before the nation takes notice? How many more people have to die, how many more homes lost before Congress delivers the same sort of comprehensive recovery package that was passed after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy?
These aren’t hypothetical questions. Houston deserves answers from the politicians who promised to help our city rebuild and guaranteed that we’d receive the state and federal resources necessary to protect Houston from the next big flood.
That federal funding, the socalled third Harvey supplemental, was supposed to arrive in November. Then it was pushed to December. Then we were told January, and it looks like Congress plans on passing the Friday budget deadline without approving anything for Harvey recovery. Maybe they’ll take it up in February or April — or never.
Instead Congress is distracted by internal fights within the Republican Party that prevent the majority from passing a simple continuing resolution to keep government open. Democrats refuse to step up and help the Republicans unless they get a clean Dream Act and long-term extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which expired last year.
It isn’t hard to imagine another timeline in which Congress faces a shutdown threat because the Texas delegation, backed by Florida and California, refuses to sign on to any budget that doesn’t deliver a massive funding package for natural disaster recovery. It would encompass Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, wildfires along the West Coast and, yes, Hurricane Harvey — including money for a third reservoir, bayou infrastructure and coastal storm surge protection. State and local leaders would be on television, lambasting Republicans and Democrats for ignoring Houston — the city that fuels the nation — after enduring one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
But that’s not the time in which we live.
Instead, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn has to wrangle his own party. His junior counterpart, Sen. Ted Cruz, was recently in Galveston to pat himself on the back for Harvey recovery efforts — a bit like if the Texans expected a parade at the end of the most recent season.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick drove to Houston to demand that Congress do better. Just kidding! They were here this week to tout a property tax plan that threatens to strangle the Harris County Flood Control District.
Republicans control all branches of the federal government, and Texas sits at the core of the party’s success — from the red-hued congressional delegation, to millions in fundraising dollars and our votes in the Electoral College. What is the point of Texas’ 25 years of loyalty to the Republican Party if we can’t get even the most basic help from the federal government when we need it the most?
That, too, is not a rhetorical question. Voters deserve an answer before the November election. For the time being, all we hear is silence.
What is the point of Texas’ 25 years of loyalty to the Republican Party if we can’t get even the most basic help from the federal government when we need it the most?