U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, greets a crowd at an Alabama Republican Party fundraiser on Aug. 4, 2023. Tuberville last week called for strings to be attached to aid to Californians suffering in the wildfires in that state. (Stew Milne for Alabama Reflector)
Whenever Alabama’s senior U.S. senator makes a statement, I usually have one reaction.
Has Tommy Tuberville thought this through?
It’s rare to see evidence that he has on anything he shares his opinions on. The senator seems like an old player piano, mechanically striking the notes of whatever melody Fox News or Newsmax feeds him.
So Tuberville plays the latest hit among the right-wing set, “California Must Do What We Say.”
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But I don’t think the senator understands where this song ends.
As you know, southern California is reeling from wildfires. They’ve killed dozens of people; destroyed tens of thousands of homes and done hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage.
Much of the congressional GOP, including the leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, want to withhold aid until California, a Democratic-leaning state, agrees to take dictation from Republicans like Tuberville about how to run things.
A lot of this comes from misunderstandings of what’s actually happening in the Golden State, particularly when it comes to water and forest management.
But this is an age where the truth of an assertion matters less than the blunt force it generates.
“They got 40 million people in this state, and (they’re) voting these imbeciles into office,” Tuberville said of California on Newsmax last week.
The senator then added something about Republicans in California — who he identified as the “good people” in the state — being “overwhelmed by these inner-city woke policies.” He added that California doesn’t “deserve anything to be honest with you unless they show us they’re going to make some changes.”
This is the part of the commentary where one would traditionally sigh and ask you to imagine any other politician saying something so ugly, selfish and heartless during a crisis.
But Tuberville is the only politician I can imagine saying this. Other Republicans share the senator’s views. But the blend of racial dog whistles; ungrounded assumptions and unsolicited policy prescriptions — that’s all Coach Pine Box.
It’s also short-sighted. Alabama always encounters disasters, whether natural or human-made.
Like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. I worked in Mobile at the time and remember the gnawing sense of dread over the month it took for that plume in the Gulf of Mexico to crash onto the Alabama shore.
But even before the first tar balls washed up in Bayou La Batre, the tourism season was wrecked. The fishing industry was grounded. People lost their livelihoods in the depths of the worst economic recession in living memory.
The next year there were devastating tornadoes that killed over 250 people in the state and left large swaths of central Alabama in ruins. Tuscaloosa looked like it had been bombed.
And each time, there was federal help. The government provided aid to victims of the oil spill and later secured a $18.7 billion settlement with BP over the destruction (though Alabama leaders spent a lot of the state’s share on paying debts and shoring up state budgets, not the coast). Federal aid came in after the 2011 tornadoes. And for countless disasters since, from the deadly Beauregard tornado in 2019 to a devastating hail storm in Camp Hill in 2023.
No one dreamed of holding that assistance back for political purposes. Americans were hurting; their government moved to help them.
But now Tuberville wants to create a world where compassion is conditional.
What would that look like?
California would have to surrender its sovereignty to a man who took months to say that white nationalism is racism.
And Alabama? What would stop a future Congress from tying strings to aid meant for us?
Oh, you had a hurricane? We’re very sorry. Hey, ever notice that Alabama ranks 24th among the states in population but 15th in carbon emissions? When your utilities cut back on fossil fuel consumption, we’ll let you rebuild your roads.
Woof, those tornadoes did a number on those businesses in your district, huh? Would love you to have these small business loans. But we can’t release them until your state leaders repeal your anti-union laws.
Drought, huh? Yeah man, farming’s rough. Anyway, stop making it hard for Alabamians to vote.
This outcome may tempt you. The federal government is almost always responsible for Alabama becoming more humane. But you’d force a lot of Alabamians into pointless suffering. It would be a disgrace.
You know, like Tuberville scolding Californians crawling through the ashes of their homes.
Still, if the GOP wants to establish that precedent, it’s hard to see future Congresses abandoning it.
That’s where this ugly song about holding aid hostage ends: in a tone-deaf crescendo where an allegedly conservative senator increases the power of the federal government; where the victims of nature’s wrath — in California or Alabama — suffer far longer than they should.
Maybe Tuberville hasn’t thought that through. The rest of us should worry about living in a world where politics take precedence over human decency.
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