A “hypocrite,” in modern political parlance, is someone who holds two opinions thought by political opponents to be incompatible. And so, since political views are always colored by circumstances and rarely align with each other with perfect philosophical consistency, the word has become a kind of all-purpose insult.
Consider the accusation now being hurled at Texas Republicans. The accusation goes something like this: They don’t like federal interference, but they’re asking for federal aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. You would think the sheer superficiality of this hot take would confine it to the more belligerent of left-wing blogs, but there it was on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times—a story headlined “After Proudly Defying Washington, Hard-Hit Texans Need Its Aid.” “Few places need the federal government right now more than Texas does, as it begins to recover from Hurricane Harvey,” writes Times reporter Richard Fausset. “Yet there are few states where the federal government is viewed with more resentment, suspicion and scorn.” Few doubt that Congress will end up passing a major aid bill, Fausset notes, but “along with an outpouring of support, the process is raising eyebrows and drawing charges of hypocrisy.”
The chief objects of scorn are members of the Texas GOP congressional delegation, especially Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who in January of 2013 either voted against or expressed serious misgivings about an aid bill for northeastern areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. They did so, they said at the time, on the grounds that the bill included a great deal in non-disaster relief funding—i.e. pork.
The bill passed easily in 2013, but some northeastern politicians haven’t forgotten the slight. “The congressional members in Texas are hypocrites, and I said back in 2012 they’d be proven to be hypocrites,” remarked the always unsubtle Gov. Chris Christie. New York Rep. Peter King aired his grievance even as Harvey ravaged southeast Texas. Reps. Frank Lobiondo (R-N.J.) and Jim Himes (D-Conn.) similarly purported to take the high road by not doing unto Texans as Texans’ had done to them.
Of course, that support is still only theoretical. The bill has only just been introduced in the House, and didn’t exist at all when these and other high-minded observers were discoursing about Texan hypocrisy. It is at least conceivable that by the time it reaches the Senate, the Harvey relief bill will contain so many unrelated and large appropriations that even some northeastern members might have second thoughts about supporting it.
We cannot divine the motives of those who voted “No” on the Sandy relief bill in 2013, but far more than Texans did so— a full 180 House members voted against it: 179 Republicans, one Democrat. (The vote passed the Senate on a voice vote.) One assumes these 180 representatives voted “no” for reasons other than crass regionalism—particularly since the bill was introduced and debated at precisely the time Congress began seriously debating the merits or otherwise of again raising the debt ceiling. Evidently the fact that the nation’s debt had recently grown larger than its GDP had begun to sober some lawmakers. And indeed the Sandy bill, when finally signed by the president, was markedly more frugal than the original House bill had been: $9.7 billion as against $51 billion.
In other words: The skeptics had a point in 2013—and that point has become more relevant, not less, in the years since. Not every federal appropriation termed “disaster relief” is equally worthy of support; many, we suspect most, are designed as much to fund unrelated boondoggles as to disburse crucial aid and repair damaged infrastructure.
We shall soon see the size and shape of the Harvey relief bill. Those who voted against the Sandy relief bill may open themselves to the charge of petty regionalism or ideological inconsistency—or, as our news media will prefer to put it, “hypocrisy.” The journalists who report on the legislation, though—and the politicians and pundits who comment on it—won’t enrich the debate by pretending there is only one righteous opinion on it.
