By BRENT MARTIN

St. Joseph Post

An attempt to quickly approve disaster assistance for victims of the Missouri River flooding has stalled in Congress after a partisan fight broke out over hurricane recovery assistance to Puerto Rico.

US Senator Roy Blunt says he’s frustrated, but likely not as frustrated as others in Congress.

“We’re probably not in as difficult a position as states that had a disaster late last year or even earlier this year,” Blunt tells St. Joseph Post. “We’re going to get in the disaster package when there is one. I wish we were in it already, but there’s a chance by the time we get in that package we’ll have a greater sense of the actual damage done.”

Blunt says damage assessment in Missouri lags behind assessments completed in Nebraska and Iowa.

Some Democrats in the Senate have held up passage of disaster assistance, complaining the federal government hasn’t done enough to help Puerto Rico fully recover from Hurricane Maria in 2017. Blunt suggests some of those Senate Democrats running for president are angling to look good to certain voting blocks in their pursuit of the White House.

Congress is struggling to decide how much and what kind of assistance it should provide farmers affected by flooding this year.

Blunt says he and other farm state senators are pushing to amend the proposed disaster assistance package to cover the loss of stored grain.

“That’s not really covered under any package and you and I have seen all those pictures and have probably both seen in person these grain bins that were affected by the flood and you have tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of grain lost, sometimes in just one bin,” according to Blunt.

Blunt does expect Congress to approve disaster aid, eventually.

“There will be a disaster aid bill and, hopefully, we’ll get all the politics rung out of this and get down to the real need that people expect the government to be able to respond to.”