The Conditions of Mike Johnson 

For once, Speaker Mike Johnson felt like a big man. Striding across the Capitol on Monday in his business attire, the diminutive Republican from Louisiana was asked if government aid for American victims of the California wildfires should be conditional.

“State and local leaders were derelict in their duties,” Johnson was talking tough. “I think there should be conditions on that aid.”

Conditions. In other words, retribution. In a time of stark crisis, when Americans of all political leanings were outraged and heartbroken as they helplessly watched the Palisades remade in the image of post-war Dresden, Johnson and a cast of Republicans were busy parsing political currents. There would be no quarter here. No warm overtures to reassure those who have suffered most recently in our alleged United States of America. After all, California is not Israel. 

More than $18 billion of aid has been sent to Israel since the terror attacks on October 7, 2023, and nary a word of complaint from Johnson and his Republicans. The best they could do is work to separate Israel’s funding from that of Ukraine and ensure a quicker, more robust passage of aid to the Knesset. In fact, every member of the House GOP except the unbending Rep. Thomas Massie spent the Friday before the LA fires signing off on legislation to sanction International Criminal Court officials who issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In our nation’s capital, it was business as usual.

Massie, Kentucky’s whiz kid who holds a soft spot for regenerative farming and the Constitution, voted “present” on the bill and watched as 198 Republicans voted in one voice to protect their favorite politician not named Donald Trump—Netanyahu. Massie’s reasoning was plain as day. “The ICC has no authority over the United States,” Massie wrote following the vote. “We should not get involved in disputes between other countries. Focus on America.”

The last sentence is a promise that Republicans, even the chest-pounding MAGA types, struggle tirelessly to make good on—“Focus on America.”

Johnson wanted the Democrats in California to bend to his will. He wanted swift punishment. The loudest of the MAGA right, the ones who have been screaming, incessantly, for several days now that the fires and the inability of crews to put them out lie squarely at the feet of LA Mayor Karen Bass, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the lesbian who runs the LA fire department, were all in agreement. It was DEI run amok. It was empty neighborhood fire hydrants that had yet to be retrofitted to fight 20,000 acres of fire burning simultaneously. More than anything, it was the fault of the Democrat voters and their Democrat mayor who just so happened to be across the world on a humanitarian mission in Ghana. Mismanagement was the word of the week, and everyone was saying it. 

In a moment of sheer misery for our Californian neighbors, the Republicans did what they often do—they mocked, they whined, and instead of finding commonality, they incited a rabble that had suddenly become experts in a subject matter none of them knew a thing about until about an hour after the first flames curled its way through the hills above Los Angeles.

“There’s a lot of members that aren’t there yet on just exactly what this would look like,” Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald said, echoing Johnson during an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox News on Tuesday morning. “I’m sure there is gonna be some things tied to any aid that’s gonna make its way to California.” 

This is the same Fitzgerald who toured Jerusalem, met with Netanyahu, and featured in an AIPAC video pledging his unabashed support for Israel amid its 15-month bombing campaign of Gaza. In the video released by AIPAC in 2024, Fitzgerald said he made the trip to Israel because “we stand strong with Israel and support Israel in whatever form that takes.” Whatever form that takes—in other words, without conditions. Fitzgerald has yet to make the trip to California to see the devastation wrought on our own people or pledge the same sort of unblinking support for its residents. Such is the game in Washington.

The fires had yet to be slowed before Johnson began pointing fingers. 

“Obviously, there has been water resource management, forest management, mistakes, all sorts of problems, and it does come down to leadership, and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty, and in many respects,” Johnson declared from his high perch in Washington 2,300 miles from ground zero. “So, that’s something that has to be factored in.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming went further in his open admonishment of California’s leadership. “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,” Barrasso said Saturday. 

When President Joe Biden attempted to slow arms shipments to Israel in May 2024, Barrasso was downright apoplectic. He said Biden should “be ashamed” of doing what was in his power to end the slaughter of civilians in Gaza. He called Israel “one of our nation’s closest allies.” No such strongly-worded missive dismissing the hardened battle cries of his Republican colleagues who are attempting to tie California aid to an increase in the U.S. debt limit could be found on Barrasso’s senate page this week.

On the topic of Californians, some of whom undoubtedly voted for his party in the 2024 election, Barrasso was adamant: “There can’t be a blank check on this.”

No blank checks, “on this.” A Congress that has handed down blank check after blank check these last 25 years, suddenly, when our actual countrymen needed them the most, would finally find its fiscal backbone. If there has been one uniting thread among our partisan political theater this last quarter century, it has been the blank check. Republican senators and Democrat Representatives have written blank checks to fund our disgusting war machine, to prop up ridiculous Covid measures, to aid in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and to lift up every other American city and community affected by natural disasters not named Los Angeles.

In fact, Johnson’s home state of Louisiana received more than $75 billion, almost three times the size of the state’s annual budget, in federal aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. No conditions, of course. As New Orleans filled to the brim with water, Congress readily opened its purse. When Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert, later convicted of sexually abusing a child, loudly protested federal spending to rebuild parts of New Orleans, both Republicans and Democrats condemned the Illinois politician, who quickly amended his criticisms. This was still America, our America. And we all lived in it.

“Never in California did we question whether 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 in response to Johnson’s comments on Thursday.  “We’d never condition it.” 

Then Newsom made a direct plea to both Trump and Johnson: “Millions of your supporters are out here. They need your help, they need your empathy, they need your care. Whatever compassion you can express, as opposed to condemnation and divisive language that has abetted nothing except mis and disinformation that has flamed fear and anxiety for folks that are just trying to recover.”

But compassion is not the nature of firebreathers and the most aggrieved members of the GOP caucus showed no signs of relenting their round-the-clock assault on California’s politicians and the hapless, hopeless Angelenos who lost everything last week.  

Speaking on Fox News Thursday morning, North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd protested unconditional aid for California residents reeling from the fires. Months after Hurricane Helene tore through his own state, Budd went for pure politics, suggesting that outgoing President Biden and the Democrats cared more about funding Southern California relief because its residents voted blue. Never mind the uncomfortable truth that the same Pacific Palisades neighborhood that was reduced to rubble by the fires voted for billionaire Republican mayoral candidate Rick Caruso over Karen Bass by an astonishing margin of 62–38 in 2022. What have facts got to do with it?

Budd, who grew up on a chicken farm and owns a gun store, has no applicable background in forest management or firefighting. That didn’t stop him from suggesting the fires could have been easily satiated if not for the Democrats in charge. “They’ve accumulated decades and decades of bad leadership of something that could be controlled but you can’t control a hurricane in Western North Carolina,” Budd said as a Fox News host hummed along in agreement. “One could’ve been prevented with good government, one could have not.”

There were a few Republican stragglers who found within themselves a moral compass among the wreckage. Thom Tillis, the senior senator from North Carolina, saw clearly what Budd could not. In a statement that might as well have been aimed directly at Budd, Tillis implored his colleagues to see themselves in those Californians who had suffered nature’s wrath.

“I would ask those folks to put themselves in the same position as people of western North Carolina,” Tillis told HuffPost. “You got to be consistent on disaster supplement, period.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, another politician from a consistently storm-ravaged state, also backed providing unconditional aid to Californians: “I think we ought to do aid the way we do everybody else.”

The question of what preventative measures, if any, could have stopped the fires has masked attacks disguised as discussion this past week, especially on Elon Musk’s 𝕏. In the midst of all the mudslinging was some stark honesty from the most unconventional of places. In the days following the first flames, a clip from podcaster Joe Rogan went viral on the platform in which the UFC announcer recounted a conversation he had with a firefighter who warned that under the worst conditions, nothing could be done, regardless of who was in charge, to stop a city-wide fire event.  

“He said, ‘Dude, one day it’s just going to be the right wind and the fire is going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean and there’s not a f—king thing we can do about it,” Rogan said. “We just get lucky, we get lucky with the wind. But if the wind hits the right way, it’s just going to burn through LA.”

Experts hashing out the early data from the LA fires all agree on one thing—the wind went the wrong way, and fast. What happened in Los Angeles last week was essentially a hurricane of fire. A perfect storm in the most imperfect of ways as the Santa Ana winds steamrolled the hillsides surrounding Los Angeles. Gusts of more than 100 mph were recorded at the height of the storm to create an apocalyptic nightmare. One video captured during the disaster showed a tornado of fire driving along a ridgeside above the Palisades. No one—not the bumbling Newsom or Speaker Johnson’s empowered brat pack—could’ve stopped the wrath laid at the doorstep of America’s Angelenos, no matter who they voted for.

Speaking before Congress on Wednesday, California Rep. Mike Levin was incensed by those who would seek to twist California’s cruel fate into a political quagmire: 

Some House Republicans are threatening to withhold disaster aid to California unless certain unknown conditions are met. My friends, this could be your state. Never in our nation’s history has the federal government placed such politically-driven conditions on disaster aid to its own citizens. This is a bad faith effort to use California as a punching bag. It’s unacceptable and downright shameful to use the suffering of Californians in need or anyone in need to solve your internal political disputes.

It’s not easy to find agreement with Democrats, especially the California types who are among the most progressive flamethrowers in America. But listening to Levin’s heart break as his GOP counterparts argued for conditional aid purely due to the political disagreements they share with the Democratic caucus left me wondering what exactly it means to be an American. The same men who have rubber stamped every dime Israel asked for these last 15 months had suddenly found a fiscal spine and it was Americans who would bear the first burden. Go figure. 

Such are the conditions of Mr. Mike Johnson and his Republican caucus. For Israel, anything. For our brothers and sisters in California, a miserable lesson in voting blue. Here’s hoping that, when the next natural disaster befalls a red state in our America, it’s not the Democrats wielding the national purse.

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