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California Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Mike Johnson sparred online throughout Thursday, as Congress considers attaching conditions to future wildfire aid for California.
Things began with the release of an interview between Newsom and left-leaning political content creator Bryan Tyler Cohen.
In the video, Newsom took Johnson and his allies to task for potentially mixing politics and disaster aid, arguing California never does that with other states, despite its large contributing to the federal budget.
“Never in California, did we question, whether we or not we, as taxpayers, in the largest state in the union, should support the people of Louisiana at a time of emergency and need,” Newsom said. “We’d never condition it.”
Newsom added that limiting future aid to California would harm millions of Republicans, too.
“Millions of your supporters are out here, they need your help,” the governor continued. “They need your empathy. They need your care. Whatever compassion you can express, as opposed to condemnation and divisive language that has aided and abetted nothing except mis- and disinformation that has flamed fear and flamed a lot anxiety for folks that are simply trying to recover.”
“Instead of making highly produced clap back videos with social media influencers, you should get to work helping Californians,” Johnson responded on X. “You’re the leader of a state in crisis, and you should finally start acting like it.”
The back-and-forth continued, with Newsom writing that Johnson needs to “do the right thing.”
“Mr. Speaker, when Louisianans need help after hurricanes, it’s Californians — many of whom have been impacted by these fires — who foot the bill to help your constituents,” Newsom wrote on X. “And they do it without playing partisan games.”
The argument came as Johnson suggested this week that Congress should put “conditions” on future wildfire aid to California, which is struggling with devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles.
“I think we’re going to have a serious conversation about that,” Johnson told reporters on Tuesday. “Obviously there has been water resource mismanagement, forest mismanagement, mistakes, all sorts of problems, and it does come down to leadership. It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects. That’s something that has to be factored in.”
However, as The Independent has reported, some in Congress oppose tying wildfire aid to upcoming spending negotiations. And many point to the impact of climate change, with southern California suffering is second-driest season in at least 150 years.
“I think we need to give them aid,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the new chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Independent.
“What we don’t want to do is politicize this issue right now, and what we should be doing is let’s get the crisis over with,” added newly elected Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio. “But there’s very, very legitimate concerns about what California has done, what they need to do to fix it.”
President Biden said last week the federal government would pay for 100 percent of the state’s disaster response costs for the next 180 days.
California lawmakers have been girding themselves for wildfire aid to become entangled with the politics of the incoming administration.
“Even if we nominally secure some of these things, the money won’t flow until Trump is president. And he’s just such a wild card, there’s reason for worry,” California Rep. Jared Huffman told Politico.
Trump has threatened to withhold aid in the past for partisan reasons, and often speaks inaccurately about wildfires in the state.
Last week, Trump claimed California Gavin Newsom refused to sign a “water restoration declaration” that would’ve freed up millions of additional gallons of water, a claim the governor’s office said was “pure fiction.”
