Western NC finally gets the Helene aid it needs. But the process sure wasn’t pretty | Opinion
Western North Carolina will get billions of dollars in disaster relief to aid Hurricane Helene recovery efforts after Congress very narrowly avoided a government shutdown Friday evening.
The aid is sorely needed. What’s disappointing is the politicking and gamesmanship that plagued the process.
Earlier this week, it seemed like Democrats and Republicans had negotiated a bipartisan agreement on a temporary spending bill that would keep the government funded through the winter and, importantly, provide more than $100 billion in disaster relief for places like Western North Carolina. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a compromise for both parties, and most importantly, it would have kept the lights on.
But that deal collapsed Wednesday after Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to rally opposition against the bill, which he called “an insane crime,” and even threatened primary challenges to any lawmaker who supported it. President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance eventually came out against the bill, too, and it was officially doomed.
The House spent the next 48 hours scrambling to cobble together a proposal that could avert a shutdown, with one attempt failing miserably even among Republicans. In the end, items like a sweeping health care package that, among other things, could have helped keep drug prices down, as well as funding for pediatric cancer research, were left on the cutting-room floor. It’s also just a punt on the issue — lawmakers will have to pass a more permanent spending plan by March as well as figure out what to do about the nation’s debt ceiling.
The opposition to the original deal wasn’t even particularly coherent. Many of the claims Musk made online were either misleading or blatantly false, including that the bill raised congressional pay by 40%, contained $3 billion for a new football stadium and funneled $60 billion in new aid to Ukraine. None of that was true. Trump, meanwhile, issued a series of typically meandering social media posts in which he appeared to endorse most of the contents of the bill whose death he had ensured. Neither Trump nor Musk seemed particularly deterred by the idea of the government shutting down.
“‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” Musk wrote on X.
Try telling that to the millions of government employees who would be furloughed — and the U.S. troops and other essential federal workers who would have to work without pay through the holidays — if the government had shut down.
What’s troubling is that all of the compromise and negotiation between parties — the very things that Congress should be doing — doesn’t seem to matter once Trump or his allies decide they aren’t keen on the idea. If this is the chaos and mess Trump is causing before he’s even in office, what are we in for once he does?
With this capitulation, Republicans have again made themselves beholden to the whims of Trump and Musk. Musk, of course, is not the president-elect, nor was he elected to any position at all. Even worse, he has displayed very little understanding of the legislative process he is hijacking, and is so obscenely wealthy that he is almost completely insulated from any of the adverse effects of his meddling, not to mention blind to the needs of the working class people he’s claiming to champion.
Credit goes to North Carolina’s senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, who were unwavering in their demand that any resolution to fund the government must include disaster relief for Western North Carolina. In a press conference Thursday, Tillis went as far as to say he was prepared to filibuster any funding bill that did not include the money that was originally promised.
The end result here was the right one. The government didn’t shut down — for now — and billions of dollars in aid will go to communities that desperately need it. But it doesn’t feel like a victory. At best, it feels like a relief. Because none of this should have happened in the first place — and there’s little to reassure us that it won’t happen again.
