Pelosi: GOP using disaster aid as excuse to kill clean-vehicles program

House Republicans are using the disaster-relief debate as a guise for killing off an environmental program they oppose, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi charged Thursday.

The California Democrat said the GOP’s proposal to cut $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) proposal is as much an effort to end that initiative as it is a deficit-reduction strategy.

{mosads}”There’s a billion and a half dollars left in the [ATVM] till,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “They take a billion of it to pay for the disaster, and they take a … half a billion of it and rescind it. So it was clear to us that this wasn’t about paying for the disaster. This was about destroying an initiative that is job-creating.

“Why would you take a half a billion dollars out of an initiative with the excuse that you need it for a disaster and just rescind it, just erase it?” she added. “We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

The House on Wednesday shot down the Republicans’ continuing resolution to fund the government through Nov. 18. The proposal included almost $3.7 billion in emergency relief for states and victims of recent natural disasters, including hurricanes on the East Coast, flooding in the Midwest and wildfires in Texas. One billion dollars from the ATVM cut would go to cover the most immediate disaster-relief costs.

Citing the ATVM cut, all but six Democrats opposed the measure. Forty-eight Republicans also voted no, objecting to the level of 2012 discretionary spending, which they say is too high.

Wednesday’s surprise vote has sent GOP leaders scrambling back to the drawing board in search of a compromise that could thread the needle between Democratic and Republican critics.

Pelosi on Thursday said that any offset to the disaster-relief provision — not only the ATVM provision — would be opposed by Democrats.

“There has never been an offset for disaster assistance,” Pelosi said.

“There are many emergencies [that have been offset],” the minority leader noted. “A natural disaster is something else.”

{mossecondads}Democratic leaders had tried unsuccessfully Wednesday to replace the GOP’s $3.7 billion provision with a $6.9 billion Senate-passed proposal that doesn’t include cuts elsewhere in the budget. 

Pelosi said she’s hopeful GOP leaders will offer a compromise that would keep the House levels of funding but drop the offset provision.

“It would be my hope that they would split the difference,” she said.

“It has to be resolved by next week,” she added. “The burden is on the majority.”