GOP Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming stated clearly Sunday that while the situation in southern California during the wildfires is “heartbreaking” and devastating for people of all economic sectors, the federal government cannot provide a “blank check” in response to requests from state elected officials.
“When you see what’s being shown on television, in addition to the tragedy on the ground, you’re also seeing gross mismanagement in California by elected officials, and it’s heartbreaking to hear the fire chief say that they’ve diverted all of this money away from the fire department to be used for social programs when they were already stretched too thin,” Barrasso said during an interview on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
“So, yes, I expect there’s going to be hearings, there’s going to be requests of Congress,” the senator continued. “There can’t be a blank check on this, however, because people want to make sure that, as rebuilding occurs, as things go on in California, they have to be resilient so that these sorts of things can’t happen again, and the policies of the liberal administration out there, I believe, have made these fires worse.”
Brennan countered: “Do you expect, though, that Congress and Republicans will still help these Americans in need, even if they don’t like their local politics in the party?”
“I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time,” Barrasso responded.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom attempted to deflect criticism of his party’s management of preparedness and leadership policies Saturday during a video interview posted to his X account. The governor said he is “not interested in politicizing” the wildfire.
Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro conducted his own analysis of the disturbing situation in his native Los Angeles in a video post from “The Shapiro Show.” The ultimate question, he said, is “Why are the LA fires so devastating?”
“It’s the effect of every bad Democratic policy happening ALL AT ONCE: environmental radicalism, budgetary incompetence, DEI,” Shapiro asserted Thursday. “Gavin Newsom, [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass, and the one-party state have brought this catastrophe on the population of my old hometown.”
The conservative author and commentator observed the “big question” is “Why didn’t you work to mitigate this?”
He provided his own assessment, comparing Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hurricane management to Newsom’s oversight of the current wildfire disaster:
See, when it comes to natural disasters, natural disasters can happen anywhere, at any time. There are earthquakes and wildfires and hurricanes, but the thing about wildfires in particular is that public policy matters an awful lot. See, with every natural disaster situation, public policy can mitigate the effects of the natural disaster. This is why, if you have an earthquake in a first world country like the United States, not a lot of buildings are going to fall down. But if you have an earthquake in a third world country, tens of thousands of people might die – same magnitude. It’s just the buildings are built to code in places like the United States. When it comes to hurricane response, how you respond matters. This is why Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, has handled disasters really, really well when it comes to mitigation and response. When it comes to preparedness, California has been an absolute disaster area. That is true for years. They’ve not done anything that they could have done to mitigate the effects of seasons like this. Gavin Newsom – the absolutely execrable governor of California – who has spent more money than any governor in the history of the state of California by a long shot – who spends billions of dollars on useless rail. By the way, I used to be a host in Los Angeles, and I actually had the opportunity to interview Gavin Newsom, and I asked him about his dumb high speed rail at the time he was running for governor, and, he said, it’s a dumb idea. And of course, he immediately reversed himself to spend billions of dollars on a rail that goes nowhere and has never been built. But Gavin Newsom was out there trying to pretend that he was handling the situation, even as half the state is apparently on fire.
Shapiro observed that, last year, President-elect Donald Trump discussed on Joe Rogan’s podcast California’s failure to do what is necessary to stop wildfires.
Agreeing with Trump, Shapiro went on to describe California’s “significant water shortage for years because they refuse to build the infrastructure necessary – the reservoirs and the dams” required to hold water from the rains in northern parts of California.
They’ve been “flushing fresh water out to the ocean for years to save something called the Delta smelt,” he added.
Shapiro asserted “there’s a ton of mismanagement” in California, “not just in terms of the fire conditions, but in terms of the political conditions for fires to rage out of control.”
“From DEI to budgeting, from environmentalism to blaming climate change, Democrats have done a horrifying job on all of this,” he summarized. “Again, you can’t blame Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass for the fires. You can blame them for not doing the preparation necessary to deal with some of the most perfectly predictable weather that California has,” with wildfires seen “pretty much every year.”
