The media is totally misrepresenting where Ted Cruz and John Cornyn were on Hurricane Sandy funding

Supposedly heartless and hypocritical, those senators voted against a $50 billion aid package in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2013, four years before asking for the very same kind of federal aid for the Texas victims of Hurricane Harvey. Except that’s not what happened.

Cruz and Cornyn supported the emergency funding the Senate approved right after Sandy, and he objected to non-emergency items in a later bill.

Regardless of the facts, though, pundits like NBC’s Katy Tur and politicians like Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., have lumped together emergency and non-emergency relief funding to paint a damning picture. It didn’t help that a sleep-deprived Cruz spoke sloppily in a Monday interview while stranded in Houston.

Pushed to explain why he wants the very same aid for Texas that he allegedly wanted to deny the Northeast, Cruz replied that the 2013 bill “was filled with unrelated pork” and that “two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.” What Cruz meant to say was that two-thirds of that $50.5 billion bill was earmarked for projects that could wait.

The $17 billion to help those left homeless in the wake of the storm was immediately necessary. The $2 million earmarked to repair leaky Smithsonian roofs in D.C., the $15 million to restore NASA launch pads in Florida, and the $44.5 million to buy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration new airplanes was perhaps important but it was not urgent.

A Cruz spokeswoman followed up the next morning explaining to the persnickety WaPo fact checkers that the senator supports legitimate relief but believes “emergency bills should not be used for non-emergency spending.”

And here’s the other thing: The Senate had already passed, with Cruz’s and Cornyn’s tacit approval, $9.7 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid, right after Sandy hit. The Senate approved the package immediately by voice vote. Cornyn and Cruz didn’t object at all.

Weeks later, when the $50.5 billion aid package came up for a vote, conservatives including Cruz and Cornyn didn’t oppose the $17 billion in immediate emergency aid. They objected to the other $33 billion that fiscal hawk former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., called “economic stimulus at best and pork-barrel spending at worst.”

Cruz said as much at the time in a statement, explaining his opposition to the “billions of dollars [that] will be spent as late as 2021.”

The argument: If it’s not an emergency, it should go through the standard appropriations process instead of being rushed through under the cover of emergency funding. That doesn’t make them a pair of hypocrites. It makes them responsible members of the world’s greatest deliberative body who, you know, want to deliberate about the merits of non-emergency spending.

Cruz and Cornyn won’t be guilty of hypocrisy until they try using Hurricane Harvey as political cover to sneak through non-emergency funding without proper oversight.

Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.