The Washington Post is trumpeting a new poll purporting to show that Americans hate Sen. Tom Coburn’s position on disaster relief funding. Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan write:
Nearly six in 10 Americans believe that the federal government should provide funds to states affected by natural disasters without having to cut spending in other areas to do so, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll.
Fifty-nine percent of all respondents say federal emergency aid need not be offset by cuts in other parts of the budget — a number that includes a majority (52 percent) of self-identified Republicans as well as nearly seven in 10 Democrats.
Those numbers come in the aftermath of a tornado that devastated the town of Moore, Okla., and led some conservatives, including Oklahoma’s own Sen. Tom Coburn, to insist that any federal spending on the cleanup effort had to come from some other corner of the federal budget.
Fifty-nine percent of all respondents say federal emergency aid need not be offset by cuts in other parts of the budget — a number that includes a majority (52 percent) of self-identified Republicans as well as nearly seven in 10 Democrats.
Those numbers come in the aftermath of a tornado that devastated the town of Moore, Okla., and led some conservatives, including Oklahoma’s own Sen. Tom Coburn, to insist that any federal spending on the cleanup effort had to come from some other corner of the federal budget.
But that isn’t Coburn’s position, and it never has been. The phrasing of the Post’s poll question is completely ignorant of how disaster spending has been funded by the federal government for decades. Here is what the newspaper asked:
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