Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) has pursuaded the House GOP leadership to put forward a Hurricane Katrina tax bill that exempts some businesses in the Gulf Coast from receiving tax breaks. According to a Ways and Means Committee summary of the bill, the "Gulf Opportunity Zone" restoration tax incentives will not be extended to country clubs, liquor stores, massage parlors, private or commercial golf courses, racetracks, tanning salons, or "facilities used for gambling." Wolf and 35 others have said they will oppose a conference agreement that puts tax breaks for those businesses back in. The fear is that the tax reconciliation bill and the Katrina tax relief bill will be combined in conference, which would put these dissenting Republicans in a significantly more precarious political position if they decided to vote their consciences. Not surprisingly, the revised House bill has drawn criticism from both the White House and prominent Republican Senators. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that administration officials "don't believe you can be selective when it comes to addressing the economic needs of the region. It should apply equally and fairly to all those businesses." Trent Lott (R-MS) said in a statement yesterday, "To reject legitimate businesses from providing good jobs to a state’s disaster victims would set a serious precedent in disaster relief funding. I cannot recall the Congress ever discriminating against legal businesses in the dissemination of disaster relief — not against gaming establishments, not against businesses which sell tobacco products." Business discrimination or not, it would have been nice to see Lott display a scintilla of this same outrage over Congressional actions to cut funding from social service programs after citizens in his region suffered in the wake of the worst natural disaster seen in recent American history.