When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in late August 2005, it took Congress just a few days to approve $10.5 billion in federal disaster aid at President George W. Bush’s request. Lawmakers cleared another $51.8 billion less than two weeks later.
There certainly were questions about what the state of Louisiana had — or hadn’t — done to protect its most populous city from such a disaster, as well as the response afterward. But President Bush and Congress didn’t indulge in such second-guessing before doing their immediate best to provide as much financial help as possible in Louisiana’s desperate time of need. And there wasn’t even a whisper of using the disaster as a means of extracting policy concessions from members of the other party. Louisianans were fellow Americans and needed help immediately. Period.
So the talk among President Donald Trump and some fellow Republicans in Congress of attempting to find points of leverage in what will be a monumental recovery effort from the wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles is, frankly, un-American. And it needs to stop.
Speaking earlier this week on Sean Hannity’s show, Trump said, “I don’t think we should give California anything until they let the water run down,” referring apparently to a disputed narrative Trump has proffered that California’s water policies for the northern part of the state are depriving the southern half of water.
Worse yet, House Speaker Mike Johnson, representing Louisiana itself, had the temerity to bluntly say he favored imposing conditions on help to California. “There are natural disasters. I’m from Louisiana. We’re prone to that; we understand how these things work,” he said. “But then there’s also human error. And when the state and local officials make foolish policy decisions that make the disaster exponentially worse, we need to factor that in.”
There but for the grace of God, Mr. Speaker.
Louisiana and New Orleans were accused of poor design of levees that were supposed to protect the city and failed. No one at the time said those mistakes should make aid contingent on various policy changes. We venture to say no one, in fact, even contemplated such a move. Americans were horrified at the human misery in New Orleans and wanted to do what they could to help, at least in the short term.
If they follow through on trying to extract concessions from political foes, Trump, Johnson and others will hurt regular people who have lost everything in the fires.
Few will dispute that California needs to learn from the horrors L.A. is experiencing to gird against future wildfires. There’s been discussion, for example, of building homes with more fire-retardant materials, as well as consideration of changes in water policies. There has been plenty of reasonable criticism of local officials.
Trump, Johnson and other Republicans can reasonably argue that Democrats who run California’s state government should do everything possible to prevent a recurrence and must be open to policy changes based on this experience. There’s no doubt that both Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are paying a steep price in the court of public opinion in the Golden State and could well pay a severe political price in the future.
Still, the federal aid should be given without strings attached.
After that, Trump and other critics have every right to weigh in on what California did wrong, both in the run-up to the fires and in the response. In fact, a truly bipartisan examination would be welcome and could help other states, primarily but not only in the American West, that deal regularly with wildfires. If the president called for that kind of response, reasonable people on the left and right would agree.
California, of course, is the largest state in the nation and regularly garners outsize attention whatever the issue. It’s also reliably blue and a frequent target for criticism from the right.
Does that situation remind you of another state closer to home? Illinois has a stake in this battle as well. Natural disasters can happen anytime, anywhere, and they don’t make exceptions for the ideological proclivities of the people in charge.
Given Trump’s frequent attacks on Chicago and Illinois and how this city and state are run, it’s not a stretch to imagine a scenario in which Trump would demand concessions — say, on sanctuary-state and welcoming-city policies — in return for desperately needed aid from, say, floods or a series of devastating tornadoes in heavily populated areas.
Unlike the federal government, cities and states can’t print their own money and have no choice under these circumstances but to seek help from Washington. Trump’s nature, as he’s demonstrated time and again in his political career and outlined in his book of long ago, “The Art of the Deal,” is to look for a negotiating advantage wherever he can find it.
It’s up to members of Congress, both Democratic and Republican, to reaffirm that power politics has no place in recovering from natural disasters. This country badly needs to find areas of bipartisan agreement and places in which we affirm our status as fellow citizens, whatever our political beliefs.
Disaster aid to states strikes us as a good place to start.
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