Dave Brat: Willing to Leave us High and Dry in a Hurricane
Hurricane Florence has wreaked havoc in the Carolinas, and we are all torn by the devastating images we see by the hour. We in the Richmond area got our own taste, with a series of tornadoes rolling through the area, hitting Chesterfield County particularly hard and bringing widespread flash flooding. Indeed, flash flood warnings have been issued regularly throughout the state and Florence, in downgraded form, has been drenching southern New England and has caused flooding in New Hampshire. While Virginia didn’t get hit as hard this time as we’d all feared, what has occurred is bad enough. And besides – we know our address is on Hurricane Alley. The names Sandy, Gaston, and Isabel are just a few of those seared in our memories (see list).
Rep. Dave Brat (R, VA-7), however, has voted consistently against funding hurricane andother disaster relief, even though Virginia has relied on such assistence on numerous occasions in the past and certainly will be this year in the aftermath of Florence. For example, following Hurricane Isabel in 2003, 93,139 Virginians applied for federal relief from 99 jurisdictions in Virginia, and by January 2004, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had approved $257 million to individuals and businesses in Virginia to help them recover (details here).
Brat has also voted against extending funding for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), despite that Virginians have received $720,147,929 in claim payments from the program since 1978. Communities participating in the NFIP include all but one of the counties in Brat’s district: Amelia, Chesterfield, Culpeper, Goochland, Henrico, Nottoway, Orange, Powhatan, and Spotsylvania.
Brat’s hardline position against offering emergency aid to fellow Americans – and to his own constituents – flies in the face of Central Virginia’s values. We believe in neighbor helping neighbor. Most Americans do: 88% believe that the federal government has a duty to provide aid in natural disasters. It’s called compassion, and the human race probably wouldn’t have survived without it. But compassion is lacking in much of Dave Brat’s voting record; in fact, during his first term in Congress, Brat earned the nickname the “Abominable No-Man” for his refusal to fund – well, just about anything.
Read more: https://bluevirginia.us/2018/09/dave-brat-willing-to-leave-us-high-and-dry-in-a-hurricane
= new reply since forum marked as read
