GOP’s Sick New Talking Point Doesn’t Bode Well for Future Disasters
Republicans seem to be trying their hardest to make placing conditions on relief to victims of devastating natural disasters seem like a normal or reasonable thing to do—by the end of the week, probably everyone will be on board.
As large swaths of Los Angeles County burned over the past week, and 24 people lost their lives, Republicans have been quick to play the blame game and use the disaster relief as an opportunity to play politics. One by one, they’ve fallen in line with their eerily identical, half-baked pitches to reform California’s liberal politics, without ever making clear exactly what politics had to do with the wildfires in the first place.
During an interview Monday on Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo Show, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville was asked why people who’d lost their homes, belongings, and businesses deserved help from Congress.
“Senator, why should other states be bailing out California for choosing the wrong people to run their state?” asked Salcedo.
“We shouldn’t be,” Tuberville replied. “They got 40 million people in that state, and they voted these imbeciles into office, and they continue to do it.”
As Tuberville explained, he didn’t blame all Californians. Just the liberal ones living in cities.
“And it’s just a very small part of ’em in that state that’s doing it. If you go to California, you run into a lotta Republicans. A lotta good people. And I hate it for them,” Tuberville explained. “But they are just overwhelmed by these inner city, uh, woke policies, with the people that vote for ’em.”
“And it—you know, I don’t mind sending ’em some money, but unless they show that they’re gonna change their ways, and they’re gonna get back to building dams and storing water, and doing the maintenance with the brush, and the trees—everything that everybody else does with the country, and they refuse to do it—they don’t deserve anything,” Tuberville said.
The Alabama Republican could barely explain what kind of policies he was criticizing—and that’s because he doesn’t even know. He’s just playing a game of telephone with every other Republican lawmaker and conservative pundit: There’s just no way for the actual ideas to make their way to the end. The important part is that the message sounds the same. House Speaker Mike Johnson took his turn on the horn just hours before Tuberville.
And, for what it’s worth, Republicans’ criticism about “woke” policies didn’t hold very much water to begin with. Nearly every reservoir in California is holding an amount of water that is at its historical average, or higher, despite the fact that it has been a particularly dry winter, Rolling Stone reported.
Donald Trump has claimed that California Governor Gavin Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” (there is obviously no such thing), and blamed the state’s efforts to preserve rivers and wetlands. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District, which feeds into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, has “the most water stored in its system in the history of the agency,” according to Mark Gold, the water scarcity director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the MWD.
Those on the ground, namely the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, have said that it was the immense size, speed, and geographical location of the fires that caused the Pacific Palisades to run out of water, not some gross liberal mismanagement. But that won’t stop Republicans from singing their tune.
One can scarcely imagine if Democrats had tried to pull this schtick when Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, home to a density of Republican voters—but this is the future of the Republican Party under Trump.