By Aviva Shen on Jan 18, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) did not hesitate to attack his fellow House Republicans
after they refused to hold a vote on providing
disaster relief funds to states affected by Hurricane Sandy. After public
shaming, the House finally passed a bare-bones aid package on January 4.
But King has not forgotten
his colleagues who tried to block funds for the devastated regions of New York
and New Jersey. On Friday morning, King recalled in a WOR-AM interview with Gov.
Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) how he and the rest of the New York delegation were made to
feel like “third world beggars”:
[King] cited a New Jersey
congressman who said on the floor that Congress now needs a “hypocrites
conference” for those whose states received funding the past and now sought to
deny the New York region what it was seeking.
“Quite frankly it’s going
to be difficult going back and working with people you sit next to and whenever
they were in need, we responded immediately,” he said. “Not one member of Congress ever voted against or said one word in
opposition to aid going to other states when the money was needed. We were
going around like third world beggars. At least they put us in that position.”
After House Speaker John
Boehner (R-OH) cancelled the Sandy vote at the last minute, King railed that
Republicans had “put a knife in the back of New Yorkers.” Indeed, more than half of the 67 Republicans who
voted against Sandy aid previously lobbied for disaster funding for their own
states before turning on New York and New Jersey. In the interview, King raged
against the injection of politics into a crisis that left his home state in shambles for over two months before
Congressional action.
King went on to praise
Cuomo’s passage of a tough gun regulation bill vehemently
denounced by many Congressional Republicans.
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