California Democrats are incensed at the suggestion that disaster aid for their state, battered by wildfires around Los Angeles, should be conditioned upon Democratic lawmakers agreeing to raise the debt ceiling.
On Monday, Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed to reporters that there had been “some” talk within the House GOP conference about tying aid for California to a debt limit increase, after President-elect Donald Trump discussed the idea with Republicans at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend.
“It does come down to leadership, and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects, so that’s something that has to be factored in,” Johnson said. “I think there should probably be conditions on that aid, that’s my personal view. We’ll see what the consensus is.”
But the consensus among Democrats on Monday was clear: absolutely not.
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“It would be precedent-setting and a terrible idea, because we should not play politics when it comes to helping those in need that have been subject to natural disasters in our country,” Democratic Rep. Salud Carbajal of California told NOTUS. “This would be a terrible precedent to play politics with Americans who are in the most vulnerable circumstances, possibly of their lives.”
“It is outrageous. We would never do that to any other state,” fellow California Democratic Rep. Scott Peters told NOTUS. “It’s also really so shameful that these kinds of people are making these kinds of comments about holding aid and blaming people while the fires are still burning.”
“I think it’s very inappropriate,” Rep. Ted Lieu said. “We should not be tying random issues to disaster assistance, and we should not be leveraging the pain and suffering of disaster victims for unrelated legislation.”
On Monday, Democratic Rep. Judy Chu — along with California Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff — extended a formal invitation to Trump to have him assess the aftermath of the wildfires firsthand.
“Given the scale of destruction across communities we represent, we invite you to tour the damage and devastation caused by these numerous fires,” Chu wrote. “We ask you to join us in meeting with those who have suffered unimaginable losses, seeing the devastation firsthand, and hearing from heroic first responders about their diligent, unrelenting service in fighting these unprecedented wildfires.”
On Saturday, Chu led fellow Democratic lawmakers on a tour of areas damaged by the Eaton Fire, while some of her Republican counterparts from the state dined at Mar-a-Lago.
Over the weekend, as Trump hosted a revolving cast of House GOP factions at Mar-a-Lago to discuss his upcoming agenda, the idea of conditioning aid for California on raising the debt ceiling came up repeatedly.
He discussed the idea on Saturday with Republican lawmakers from states like New York, New Jersey and, notably, California, as he met with members of the so-called SALT Caucus, which is composed of members who want to raise the deduction cap for state and local taxes. (Trump and Republicans capped the deduction at $10,000 in their 2017 tax overhaul, effectively raising taxes on wealthy property owners in a number of states.)
But Trump made news for also bringing up the conditional aid idea, which he later discussed on Sunday with a more diverse group of Republicans, as one of the lawmakers told NOTUS.
“I’m always a little cautious, when people talk about things, as if the Democrats couldn’t have decided to do so,” another one of the Republicans who made the trip to Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, said.
“We always have to be very careful not to go down a road we don’t want the Democrats to do when one day they’re in control,” he continued. “We just have to be aware of potential precedents of what we’re saying.”
Díaz-Balart cautioned against putting too much weight on outside comments so early in the process. “If that’s coming from the speaker, it’s a different story, but if it’s coming from outside members right now,” he said. “Take it for what it is.”
For the time being, California is receiving federal disaster relief funds unilaterally unlocked by President Joe Biden. But the state could soon need to turn to Congress for longer-term relief.
“When fellow Americans need help, we need to help them,” Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson, who represents Napa Valley, said. “And there’s nothing imaginable that is more heart-wrenching than losing family members, everything we own, our livelihood. This is when the Congress of the United States of America needs to step up and do its job.”
Tying relief to debt-ceiling legislation could bring more votes on board and give Republicans an easier go at lifting the borrowing limit, after GOP lawmakers tried and failed to do so in December. But it also would play into Democratic claims that Republicans only impose aid restrictions when disasters strike blue states, like when Hurricane Sandy battered the New York area in 2012.
While it’s true that Republicans have an inconsistent record on when they demand conditions for disaster aid — Hurricane Harvey aid in 2017 became a flashpoint for this controversy — it’s also true that it was another notable Trumpworld figure who first led the charge in 2005 to demand that Hurricane Katrina aid be offset when he was in the House: former Vice President Mike Pence.
Still, California Republicans tried to downplay the messy politics of potentially opposing a Trump idea like tying disaster aid to a debt-ceiling hike.
“We frequently have legislation around here that has several things in the package,” Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa of California said. “Both these things have to be done, put them in a package and get them out the door as quickly as possible, you know.”
LaMalfa continued that “some people rightly will think, ‘Well that sure is not really legislating.’”
“But that’s dealmaking back here,” he said.
The incentive to find more votes for a debt-ceiling increase is a powerful one.
Last month, Trump cast the looming deadline to raise the limit as an impending “guillotine,” claiming Democrats were “looking to embarrass us in June when it comes up for a Vote.” But 38 conservatives showed a willingness to buck the president-elect and tank a continuing resolution that would have punted the issue for much of Trump’s term.
“It’s one of those things, when you get on one side of the fence, when you’re in the majority, you think one way, but when you’re in the minority, you think another,” Rep. Tim Burchett told NOTUS last month.
Burchett, a conservative who has never voted to raise the debt limit and who defied Trump in voting against the CR, also called the debt limit “an arbitrary thing” in that interview with NOTUS last month, suggesting that Congress ought to do away with it entirely.
“We don’t follow the debt ceiling,” Burchett said. “We always vote to raise it or whatever. And you know, if we’re not going to use it, we ought not to have it, honestly.”
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Mark Alfred and Samuel Larreal are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
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