Hurricane Harvey Shifts Political Winds in Washington<br />“The truth of the matter is, they don’t need money to build a wall in Texas, but to rebuild the shoreline in Texas.”<br />Facing a difficult September, deeply divided over spending and what to do about the debt limit, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders may find<br />that a devastating storm has provided them the common cause that has proved so elusive after their failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.<br />As Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a senior Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee, put it, “There will be members who will have to eat a little crow,<br />but the bottom line is the votes are there” because “Congress wants to look functional.”<br />Part of looking functional, he said, is ending discussion of shuttering the government<br />in a dispute over whether to provide money for a wall border on the southern border.<br />“This is going to change the whole dynamic for September and, quite frankly, for the Republican establishment for the remainder of the 115th Congress,”<br />said G. William Hoagland, a longtime chief budget adviser to Senate Republicans who is now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center.<br />Instead, both Mr. Trump and his putative allies in Congress — many of them professed fiscal hawks — are promising an outpouring of federal aid to begin a recovery and rebuilding effort<br />that will last for years and require tens of billions of dollars, if not substantially more, from Washington.
