When Opportunity Knocks, Conservatives Answer

"Maybe something good can come from this hurricane," Senator Lindsey Graham (R - S.C.) told FOX News Sunday's Chris Wallace on September 18.

Graham and Wallace were discussing the "torrent of federal spending" on relief and reconstruction projects in the Gulf coast states devastated by Hurricane Katrina that is "just exploding the deficit" (both Wallace's phrases). The Senator was advocating for budget cuts to balance the up to $200 billion of disaster spending.

"There are many ways to save money," Graham said. "You could have an across-the-board cut, non-defense across-the-board cut. You could delay the implementation of the prescription drug bill. We could start -- you know, there's so much opportunity here to go back into the budget and extract some savings to help pay for this hurricane relief that I look at it as an opportunity for the Congress to get back to its roots of being fiscally sound and conservative."

Senator Graham wasn't the only person to see opportunity in the United States' worst natural disaster.

Not-So-Compassionate Congressional Conservatives

On September 15, the Wall Street Journal reported that "Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond."

The House Republican Study Committee (RSC, which the Journal referred to as the Republican Study Group) featured prominently in the article. The RSC is "a group of over 100 House Republicans organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives." RSC chair Representative Mike Pence (R - Ind.) told the newspaper, "The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot. ... We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was."

According to the Wall Street Journal, RSC members met on September 13, "in a closed session ... at the conservative Heritage Foundation headquarters here to map strategy. Edwin Meese, the former Reagan administrationattorney general, has been actively involved."

The RSC's "free-market solutions" include "proposals to eliminate regulatory barriers to awarding federal funds to religious groups housing hurricane victims, waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states; and making the entire region a 'flat-tax free-enterprise zone.'" These proposals "are all part of a philosophy of lowering costs for doing business," in order to speed reconstruction, said RSC member Representative Todd Tiahrt (R - Kan.).

Eight days later, the RSC went public with "Operation Offset," [PDF] a detailed twenty-four page document of suggested cuts to the federal budget that would, according to their estimate, save more than $540 billion over the next five years. Their stated aim is, in Representative Pence's words, to "insure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren."

(However, it's hard to believe that the RSC has hurricane victims' needs at heart. A story featured on their website claims [.doc file] that "two Katrina evacuees spent federal assistance to buy expensive handbags," echoing Reagan smears against women on welfare -- especially African-American women.)

It's not surprising that many of the RSC's proposed cuts would accomplish other far-right goals besides decreasing the deficit. "Operation Offset" would encourage Defense Department employees to open health savings accounts (because they "would encourage individuals to be more cost-conscious when purchasing health care products"). More dramatically, it would eliminate:

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