Extorting With Disaster: Why Stop At California?

Nice hurricanes you got there, be a shame if you had to expand Medicaid to get help.

Fire personnel respond to homes destroyed while a helicopter drops water as the Palisades Fire grows in Pacific Palisades, California on January 7, 2025. (Photo by David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images)

IT’S APPARENTLY IN FASHION to put a price on disaster aid, at least as your opening bid. For Southern California, struggling with apocalyptic wildfires, President Donald Trump wants the state to pass a voter ID law and “turn the valve” that sends water from Northern to Southern California. (For the record, there is no valve and there is no water-supply shortage.)

Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and other Republicans have discussed raising the debt limit as part of a disaster aid deal, as well as requiring California to correct alleged “water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems,” as Johnson put it.

These critiques are only slightly less misguided than Trump’s valve fixation. Southern California reservoirs are at “record-high levels,” forest land is mostly federally owned, and the state has ramped up its own forest management in recent years. It’s even more difficult to take Johnson seriously when he says imposing conditions on disaster aid makes sense because of “the vast majority of the American people who do not want to subsidize crazy California leftist policies that are dangerous for people.”

Call their policies crazy and leftist, but California leaders do in fact understand that climate change is supercharging drought, heat, and wildfires, and they are trying to mitigate the threat. The state’s problems this year have to do with water pressure, Santa Ana winds, “an epic dry streak,” and a rainy season that didn’t start until January 25, about two months late.

Before that belated storm, which dropped roughly a half-inch to slightly over an inch in most of the area, downtown Los Angeles had not seen more than one-tenth of an inch “on a calendar day since 0.13 of an inch fell on May 5.” That was a record 265 days before the Saturday night storm.

Hear me out, fellow Americans: Why stop at California? How about some conditions for other states in their times of need?

A disaster aid ransom wish list

Let’s start with Johnson’s home state of Louisiana. How about conditioning disaster aid for the next hurricane on repealing a law that requires all classrooms in the state to display the Ten Commandments? A federal judge last fall said it was “overtly religious” in purpose and “unconstitutional on its face.” It could be struck down any day now. If that problem is solved and we need an alternative, Louisiana should have to repeal its draconian abortion law and restore rights and health care for women.

How about Texas? When the state’s independent power grid failed in bitterly cold conditions in February 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed an emergency declaration, sent federal aid, and signed a major disaster declaration to broaden help from federal agencies. Next time Texas is in crisis, how about we help them only if the governor expands Medicaid to cover all individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line?

More than 1.4 million people, nearly 80 percent of them in families with at least one worker, would be eligible for coverage—boosting their access to care and stabilizing the finances of rural hospitals. And speaking of health, repealing Texas’s abortion ban—one of the worst in the nation for women and their health—would be high on my list as well.

And let’s not forget Florida. The hurricanes keep on coming—so maybe Florida should be required to once again officially acknowledge climate change, its causes and its impact, and recommit to renewable energy and water infrastructure. I’d also hold out for repeal of its abortion ban, as restrictive and damaging as the laws in Texas and Louisiana, and Medicaid expansion, which could cover as many as nearly 800,000 people, most of them in working households.

North Carolina is another state prone to hurricanes—and in fact Hurricane Helene last fall triggered a Biden administration recovery effort led by Deanne Criswell, the impeccably qualified and unanimously confirmed director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There were no conditions attached, but here are two that would have been nice.

First, the state should have to reverse the blatant power grab executed late last year. Over Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, an outgoing Republican supermajority diluted and restricted the powers of incoming Gov. Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson (both Democrats) and gave control of elections to the new state auditor (shocker, he’s a Republican).

Second, North Carolina must be required to fix its severely gerrymandered U.S. House maps. A court-drawn map in 2022 produced a seven-seven split between GOP and Democratic House winners, a fair outcome considering the wins and losses of Democrats and Republicans alike in statewide races for governor, senator, and president. Last year, permitted by a GOP-dominated state supreme court to redraw their own map, Republicans won ten House seats, Democrats won four.

Mess with California at your own risk

All of this is about as likely to materialize as a voter ID bill introduced by a couple of Republicans in California’s overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. And none of it should be required as ransom for disaster aid that’s being held hostage.

Sen. Adam Schiff, who is from Southern California, called the whole idea shameful. “When his state was hit by Katrina, I fought to get aid for Katrina,” he said of Johnson on NBC’s Meet The Press. “I went with a congressional delegation a year later to see how the recovery was going and to raise issues about how slow it was, and how we needed to bring more urgency to it. I never even thought for a moment, ‘Okay, this is a red state. Maybe we shouldn’t provide aid, or maybe we should tie it to some unrelated policy objective.’”

Even if it were the only way to get aid for his state, Schiff said, he would not agree to any kind of tradeoff: “I am not going to go down the road, for the first time ever, of conditioning aid to Americans who are hurting with unrelated policy matters. We’re just not going to go there.” He also told host Kristen Welker that his state has “given more to the recovery of other states than any other state in the union.”

That stands to reason since California is the fifth-largest economy in the world (as of July) and the largest donor state to the federal government. In 2022, the most recent tax year analyzed by the Rockefeller Institute, it paid $83.1 billion more to the federal treasury than it received. Without the COVID aid it received that year along with every other state, its “donation” to the rest of the country would have been over $126.5 billion.¹

California is an easy target, but it’s far more than that. It would be comparable to Canada if it were its own country, and that is not as far-fetched as it seems. A poll released January 19, as Trump was about to take office, showed 61 percent of Californians favor a peaceful “Calexit” and 77 percent said California should control its state borders “more like a country.” A few days later, as Trump was about to visit, the California secretary of state cleared a petition drive to get a secession proposal onto the 2028 ballot.

Trump wants to be the president who annexed Greenland and Canada, not the one who lost California. If there’s a lesson here, it may be make love, not war, and stop referring to the governor as “Gavin Newscum.” Trump has a country. The question is whether he can keep it.

1. Correction (January 31, 2025, 11:00 a.m. ET): As originally published, this sentence gave the figures for California’s balance of payments with the federal government as $83.1 million and $126.5 million instead of billions.