(DailyKOS) -- This morning, there was a very interesting -- and yet, not so shocking -- article about how 'responsible' the Republican U.S. House of Representatives was going to be with legislating this year, where they would try to 'not' rock the boat too much.
What was mentioned along the way was something about a budget and how they already passed one before the end of the year, and how that was out of the way.
But there's still the issue of the Flint water crisis and the tone from the DailyKOS post I refer to above, which suggests the possibility that a more fiscally responsible house and senate, might not take solving the Flint problem for Michigan's government so seriously. It's noted in the write up that Democratic senator Harry Reid, went right after Snyder, saying what needed saying on the senate floor.
"Republicans disparage government all the time as intrusive, too involved, and detrimental to our society. Gov. Rick Snyder is a leading cheerleader of that theory," Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. "He denigrates government every single chance he gets. But to whom does he turn when he needs help cleaning up the mess he has created? The federal government."Actually, most the the article the DailyKOS is referring to is from The Washington Post, where it also mentions Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, who says:
told the Detroit Free Press's Melissa Nann Burke recently
Yes, no 'blank check' is right.
On the 28th of January, NPR's Morning Edition spoke with Michigan state official Lt. Governor Brian Calley about taking responsibility and trying to get funding from the federal government.
The Obama administration had issued an emergency declaration, we have people on the ground from FEMA that are helping to coordinate things and some expertise that they're bringing to bear. With respect to the infrastructure itself, there was a pretty big misunderstanding that the federal government was sending 80 million dollars. And when we really dug into that what we found was that it's not really a grant for the city of Flint, what it is is the ability for them to borrow money and from what we can tell, it looks like 17 million is about as much as we would be allowed to send to Flint. So we're working with them, could we get some flexibility in that, could we get the money that has fewer strings attached.In the rest of the four minute interview, the host asks if anything criminal has taken place and whether the state is now blaming the federal government for not responding with the finances they say they want.
There isn't much publicity or even reports about president Obama running to solve the Flint problem, probably because of what Harry Reid said, where he's letting the state try to solve its own problem, and just lending a bit of a hand to get them started because, he has to. But then again, it's Michigan's new tea party government who caused the problem so why should the president bend over backwards to help them out?
"Michigan Can Expect Some Well-Earned Tough Love From Washington" by ZOEDUNE, Survival Journalism is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Based on a work at http://wp.me/p45QXk-KY. [Featured image by Donkey Hotey via Flickr / BY CC 2.0]
Update: fixed grammatical errors. [02/11/2016:3:20PM-CST]