Last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) shockingly demanded that Congress should not approve emergency aid to states battered by Hurricane Irene unless it makes offsetting budget cuts elsewhere first. Several other congressional Republicans have made the same demand since then.

Now, Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) has joined this chorus of disaster aid hostage takers. Hayworth, who represents a portion of New York that the hurricane hit, said Congress has to have budget cuts before it allocates more disaster aid because the “challenges we face with the national budget have not changed,” and likened it to a family skipping a vacation:

Only days after a record-setting storm destroyed her district, Rep. Nan Hayworth and her House colleagues threatened to withhold disaster money if lawmakers don’t cut additional spending from the federal budget. “We’re facing a natural disaster in the middle of an economic disaster,” Hayworth said Wednesday. “Certainly, the challenges we face with the national budget have not changed.”

Hayworth, R-Mount Kisco, said she would only vote to replenish the federal disaster fund if new spending was offset by budget cuts. She said those cuts should come from “non-defense discretionary spending.” Hayworth likened her position to a family skipping vacation if it was overwhelmed by bills. “We have to control spending,” she said. “There’s no question about it.”

Hayworth represents a number of cities, including Yorktown, that were battered by Irene. Thousands of her constituents were left without power and there was widespread flooding and damage to water systems, as some towns are now warning their residents to boil their water before consumption. Orange County alone said it received three times as many emergency phone calls as during a major snowstorm in February 2010, and 36,000 people were left without access to electricity. A resident of the town of Monroe in Orange County posted a YouTube video of the streets outside, where natural waterfalls had formed from flooding and cars were stuck in water:

Both Govs. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) have called on their fellow Republicans to immediately deliver disaster aid and put aside hostage taking about complimentary budget cuts.

With the threat of Hurricane Irene to millions of Americans from the Carolinas to New England, President Barack Obama has been doing the job he was hired for, overseeing and directing the coordinated response of federal, state, and local government to minimize the loss of life and property from this monstrous storm.

On Saturday, Obama chaired a meeting at the National Response Coordination Center at FEMA’s Washington headquarters, and “convened a conference call with members of his senior emergency response team including Vice President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, among others.” He also “heard updates on Saturday from governors and emergency management officials in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.”

Right-wing pundits lashed out at Obama, bizarrely claiming that the President of the United States is engaged in a political campaign when he commands the executive branch’s response to Hurricane Irene:

“How to Politicize a Hurricane,” Koch Industries lawyer John Hinderaker cried, saying Obama “posed for a photo-op today, pretending to have something to do with the potentially-severe weather event.”

Scared Monkeys: “The President left the friendly confines of “Life styles of the Rich & Famous to try and act presidential. However, it seems like more of a shameless photo-op.”

“Fearless Leader “Takes Charge” At Hurricane Command Center…” Weasel Zippers writes. “More like a pathetic photo-op.”

Six years after the Bush administration’s criminal failure to protect the citizens of the Gulf Coast from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, American conservatives are still reeling. One of the prime tenets of the American right — that everyday Americans don’t ever need a strong federal government — was belied by the tragedy of Katrina. Bush put FEMA under the control of an Arabian horse commissioner, Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, eviscerating the crucial agency and demoralizing its proud public servants. Instead of responding to the warnings of National Weather Service officials or to reports of levee failures and mass suffering, Bush spent five days on photo ops like cutting a birthday cake with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and playing a guitar with country singer Mark Wills, and going to political events to promote Medicare Part D.

Before this year’s billion-dollar climate disasters struck across the nation, Obama rebuilt the tattered Federal Emergency Management Agency into a shining example of how our government serves the Constitutional mandate to protect the public welfare in times of need. Not every president plays guitar and eats cake when the safety of Americans is threatened.