Mike Johnson: There’s No Rush For Congress To Approve Hurricane Relief
HuffPost
“We’ll be back in session immediately after the election,” the House speaker said of waiting until November for Congress to vote on emergency funding.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he won’t call Congress back into session early to fast-track emergency funding for hurricane victims, arguing that there’s no rush since “it takes a while to calculate the actual damages.”
“We’ll be back in session immediately after the election,” he said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.”
“That’s 30 days from now. The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that,” he continued.
Members of Congress left Capitol Hill late last month to focus on campaigning in their home states. They are scheduled to return on Nov. 12, a week after Election Day.
President Joe Biden had asked lawmakers to hasten the approval of about $1.6 billion in federal funding towards the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, which Biden said will run out of funding in weeks.