Commentary: Can we end the talk of attaching strings to disaster aid?

House Speaker Mike Johnson has advocated placing conditions on disaster aid for California. — Sen. Brian Schatz on the idea of attaching strings to California disaster aid That threat has been made by Trump; his disaster czar, Ric Grenell; House Speaker Mike Johnson ; Sen. John Barrasso, a member of that chamber’s GOP leadership; and Rep. Byron Donalds, among many others. in the scope of disaster.” Donalds said that “if a state is so grossly mismanaged that the initial disaster is not quickly contained, then we have a responsibility to do common-sense things.” On the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Barrasso asserted that “the policies of the liberal administration” in California “have made these fires worse.” Before examining the natural disasters that have afflicted these blowhards’ own backyards, it’s proper to note that this isn’t California’s first encounter with political shortsightedness on this majestic scale. “I took on the New Orleans men,” Swing recalled, “putting to them again and again whether they could see any difference between the Mississippi’s flood threat to their people and the Colorado River flood threat to the people of the Imperial Valley.” Two landmark federal measures were born as a result: the Flood Control Act of 1928, which created a levee construction program costing an unprecedented $300 million, and the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which authorized the construction of a $165-million high dam on the Colorado, eventually to be christened Hoover Dam. If Johnson were to stick with his insistence that “governance” were to be a factor in the disbursement of federal assistance, observes Louisiana journalist Greg LaRose, the state might “no longer be entitled to federal assistance after hurricanes because state policy has allowed the fossil fuel industry to carve up its coastal marshes, making south Louisiana more susceptible to storm damage.” The Census Bureau reported that Louisiana had the highest percentage of residents displaced by natural disasters of any state in 2023 — about 8.3%, compared with the national average of 1.6%.