Clearly, state policy needed to change if the feds were to continue to provide aid after epochal disasters. I mean, look at the numbers:

In 2017, Hurricane Irma killed 84 Floridians. In 2018, Hurricane Michael killed 50. In 2022, Hurricane Ian killed 150. In 2024, Hurricane Milton killed 35. That’s 319 Floridians killed by the state’s biggest hurricanes in the past eight years, not counting those killed in smaller hurricanes and tropical storms.

And on whose watch did these disasters occur? Until 2019, Republican Gov. Rick Scott (now a U.S. senator from that state). Thereafter, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Did either of those governors do anything to restrict development in hurricane-prone areas? Did they build seawalls capable of withstanding the floodwaters?

No.

Did congressional Democrats therefore vote to restrict relief and rebuilding aid to those states, despite those Republican governors’ failure to do those things, and despite such other policies to which Democrats objected, such as their attacks on public libraries and elected district attorneys?

No.

Did congressional Democrats condition their unanimous support for those relief and rebuilding efforts on those Republican governors changing their policies?

No.

Did congressional Democrats use the occasion of these disasters to concoct demagogic attacks on those governors?

No.

Contrast that record, then, with what we’ve seen not just from Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the wake of the (still ongoing) Los Angeles fires, but also from a horde of congressional Republicans. On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), said "there should probably be conditions on that aid," while the Senate Republican whip, Wyoming’s John Barrasso, said the fires were the result of "policies of the liberal administration out there." Rep. Zach Nunn went Johnson and Barrasso one better, warning California to "change bad behavior" if it wanted federal assistance, adding that "we should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy."

Tax policy? Anyone who knows beans about California knows that the foremost obstacle to local government funding is Proposition 13, which has reduced local government coffers by well over a trillion dollars since such far-right cranks as Howard Jarvis—a premature MAGA type—inflicted it on the state back in 1978.

The point, however, is that any sentient being should understand that hurricane-force winds sweeping over the hillside chaparral in a rainless year can bring mass destruction their wake, just as hurricane-force winds sweeping over a state that’s surrounded by hurricane-prone oceans and where the land is only a few feet higher than sea level can bring mass destruction in their wake, too. And that public policy—with the possible exception of very long-standing public policy that permitted development in flood-prone, fire-prone endangered areas—has no significant causal relation to the ensuing apocalypse.

Congressional Democrats have understood that. Congressional Republicans—at least, the minority still receptive to empiricism—get that, too, but that hasn’t stopped them from using the occasion of the L.A. fires to attack Democratic political leaders, because their commitment to delegitimating their political opponents trumps whatever residual commitment they may have to understanding and acknowledging reality.

If Republicans really want to put such conditions on aid to California, I can think of several congressional swing districts in the state currently represented by Republicans that could flip into the Democratic column in next year’s midterm election. Beyond that, I doubt that the policy of politicizing and restricting aid to Americans who’ve just gone through a natural disaster—no small number of them Republicans—is all that popular outside the frothing faithful of MAGA-world.

Besides, how would setting such a precedent for recovery assistance affect a Democratic House majority in 2027 when it considers how to respond to one of Florida’s inevitable hurricanes? Are Republicans counting on the Democrats to observe the standards of good-faith empiricism while they themselves are free from such niceties? In much the same ways that they count on Democrats to accede to legitimate Republican electoral victories without so much as a peep, even as the Republicans define themselves by trying to overturn legitimate Democratic victories by almost any means possible? Republicans assume Democrats won’t succumb to a political Gresham’s law, in which all the basic norms of democracy would descend to the Republicans’ "power über alles" standards. If I were a Republican, I wouldn’t count on the Democrats forever upholding standards that the Republicans have so gleefully abandoned.