Procedural disputes in the U.S. Senate are blocking the distribution of urgently needed financial relief for Hurricane Floyd victims in eastern North Carolina.

The perpetrators of this outrageous foot-dragging are Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. The two are bickering with each other over the the congressional budgetary process, apparently oblivious to the plight of those displaced by the storm.

In March, the House passed an emergency spending measure that included more than $300 million in hurricane relief for North Carolina, with part of the money earmarked for helping hurricane refugees move out of the cramped trailers in which they have been confined for months. When the bill, which contained a number of provisions unrelated to Floyd relief, reached the Senate, Lott stopped it in its tracks, saying disaster assistance would be addressed as part of the normal appropriations process. In April, Lott approved a Senate committee’s inclusion of $250 million in storm aid in an agriculture spending measure. But Daschle blocked the agriculture bill from a vote on the Senate floor, citing a congressional tradition of having spending bills originate in the House.

Congress watchers say the differences between Lott and Daschle have less to do with procedural niceties than with a partisan and ideological struggle to gain leverage over each other on a number of unrelated issues, including a gun-control measure that Daschle wants to move to the floor and Lott doesn’t want the chamber to consider. Meanwhile, in the House, an agriculture bill has been sidetracked due to a dispute between Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas. and congressmen of his own party over whether the measure should include an end to the ban on the shipment by the United States of medicine to Cuba. While Lott, Daschle and other lawmakers on both sides of the partisan aisle engage in petty bickering, people in eastern North Carolina wait — and continue to suffer.

At the request of Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., nine members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation have signed a letter to Lott, demanding immediate action on the relief bill. “The people of eastern North Carolina ought to be outraged,” Etheridge said. Referring to Lott’s home state of Mississippi, Etheridge added, “I hope we don’t have to have [a hurricane] hit the Gulf states to break this logjam.”

Rep. David Price, D-N.C., says that from a procedural standpoint, the simplest way for Congress to proceed with Floyd would be for Lott to relent and let the Senate pass the bill the House approved last March. But North Carolina’s junior senator, Democrat John Edwards, says that’s not going to happen because Lott is “completely staked out. It’s a dead end.” Edwards added, however, that a relief bill for eastern North Carolina will eventually pass. “It’s a question of when.”

But “when” is of extreme importance. Billy Ray Hall, director of the N.C. Hurricane Redevelopment Center, says the state has struggled to distribute Floyd aid in a timely manner. The sooner Congress gets off its duff and makes money available, he says, the sooner housing can be built and the sooner families can vacate trailers and move into adequate quarters. “A lot of these trailers have six to eight people in them,” Hall said. “Imagine if your grandmother was in there. ... These folks have every right in the world to be frustrated.” Indeed they do, and its a pretty safe bet, judging by their abject failure to act, that no trailers down east are being occupied by the grandmothers of Trent Lott and Tom Daschle.

Edwards and this state's senior senator, Jesse Helms, might place phone calls to Daschle and Lott, respectively, and say, “Look, old buddy, one day soon you’re going to need my help on some little old bill. If you expect to have a snowball’s chance in the hot place of getting it, then you’d better get about the business of providing some relief to my folks in North Carolina.”

Hurricane Floyd wreaked devastation that continues to inflict extreme hardship on our brethren down east. Until they demonstrate a modicum of compassion for the storm’s victims, Lott, Daschle and a handful of other congressional obstructionists remain witting accomplices to that devastation.