As swaths of Southern California burn, the state’s Republican members of Congress find themselves facing a dilemma.
Blaming the fires on California’s liberal policies, President Donald Trump and GOP congressional leaders have proposed attaching assorted conditions to federal disaster aid— a move that, if taken seriously, threatens to delay recovery efforts.
The choice before members of the state’s GOP House delegation is a tricky one: Would they fight for unconditional aid to constituents in their home state but risk incurring the wrath of Trump, who has a reputation for rewarding loyalists and punishing those who cross him? Or would they side with their party’s president but risk criticism from future opponents that they didn’t rush to help a California in need?
How they resolve this could not only affect their own careers, but also influence Congress’ ability to carry out Trump’s agenda. The GOP holds a three-seat majority in the House — an advantage so slim that it takes only a few Republicans aligning with the other party to block any measure, including a conditional disaster relief package.
The delegation already is splintering. Rep. Young Kim — a swing district Republican representing fire-prone parts of Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties — decried talks of conditional aid as “playing politics with people’s livelihoods” and a “slap in the face” to wildfire victims and firefighters. As Trump toured Los Angeles on Friday, Kim said that while she believed the state had “a lot of problems,” those were “unrelated” to the distribution of federal aid.
But Rep. Tom McClintock, whose district in the Sierra mountains and foothills south of Lake Tahoe saw the state’s largest wildfire in 2022, adamantly agreed with the president on making the aid conditional, adding that federal agencies should distribute relief dollars directly to victims. And Rep. Darrell Issa, whose district bordering Mexico is battling wildfires now, told Trump at a Friday roundtable in Los Angeles that there must be conditions in the relief package to “prevent it or at least mitigate it from happening again.”
It’s hard to know how to interpret the unprecedented demands the president has issued to California in the past two weeks: He’s variously said that to get federal aid, the state must overhaul its water policies, change its forest management, end sanctuary protections for immigrants, and require people to show ID to vote. Yet when the cameras were rolling during his Friday visit to Los Angeles, he also promised a lot of help.
“We’re going to get it fixed — though we’ll get it permanently fixed so it can’t happen again,” Trump said of the wildfires while speaking to reporters after landing in Los Angeles Friday. That might be a daunting challenge, given that fire experts blame the infernos on climate and weather conditions.
Fire experts have repeatedly debunked the notion that the state’s water policies played a role in worsening the fires, and the vast majority of California’s forests actually are owned and managed by the federal government.
It also isn’t clear what conditions the House’s leader would consider attaching. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has discussed using disaster aid as leverage to get Democratic support for raising the debt ceiling, especially since the debt limit increase could enrage some fiscal hawks within the Republican Party. But House Democrats called Johnson’s approach a “nonstarter.”
Tying disaster relief funds to the debt ceiling is not new. In 2017, as part of the relief package to Hurricane Harvey victims, Trump agreed to Democrats’ request to put off the debt ceiling discussions for three months.
But separate from linking the aid to the debt ceiling, Johnson also seems open to forcing California to change its policies as a condition of receiving aid, similar to Trump’s threat.
At a Jan. 14 Politico event, Johnson initially said that “we don’t play politics with disaster aid.” But then he quickly blamed California policies for worsening the wildfires, arguing those policies must be “factored in with regard to the level of aid and whether there are conditions upon that, or safeguards, you might say.”
Johnson has given conflicting statements about conditional disaster aid before. First, at the Politico event, he said conditional aid would be a “brand-new idea.” But in a podcast interview with host Bari Weiss almost a week later, Johnson pointed to post-disaster rebuilding conditions placed on Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. However, in that case, Congress approved the aid first and then passed a separate law to change state and local mitigation efforts, PolitiFact reported.
Regardless, what Trump has threatened may never materialize. Even if the U.S. House does attach strings to disaster relief, Democrats in the GOP-controlled Senate presumably could filibuster, essentially talking the bill to death. It takes 60 votes to cut off debate and there are only 53 Republicans senators, some of whom have their own qualms about making disaster assistance contingent on a state complying with federal terms.
“This is just noise,” said Doug Ose, a Republican who represented Sacramento in Congress from 1999 to 2005. “I don’t think the conditions are going to survive. …The Democrats in the Senate will do what they can do to make President Trump’s job difficult.”
‘Poking your head up makes you a target’
Nonetheless, the potential of a House vote has amped up the pressure on California Republicans.
Most members of the state’s GOP delegation appear to be simply ducking the question. When reached by CalMatters, most blamed state and local policies for the wildfires while stressing the importance of delivering aid. But they refused to say whether Washington should try to force the state to make policy changes in exchange for aid.
“Poking your head up makes you a target,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at California State University, Sacramento. “I can imagine the calculus being a lot about how much can you get done that’s not publicly visible, behind the scenes and quietly — without taking a stand that might get you in trouble.”
The fights over conditional aid showcase a lack of trust between a Republican-controlled federal government and a Democrat-dominated California, Ose said.
“There’s just an enormous amount of dislike for the political vibe that comes out of California,” he added. “There’s just too much political gain to be had by demanding Gavin Newsom’s scalp on this.”
The raging wildfires made California a tinderbox literally but also politically, as many California Republican delegation members joined in on blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for the wildfire response while demanding policy changes.
In an interview with conservative Newsmax, McClintock said he “absolutely” agreed with conditional federal aid to California.
“No federal aid should pass through the hands of Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass or their agencies,” he said. “They’ve proven themselves to be completely incompetent in managing public lands and completely incapable of making good decisions.”
Cathy Abernathy, former longtime aide to former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said Republicans should use this opportunity to force policy changes in California, even if it’s politically hard.
“It’s obviously easier for a member of Congress from one of the other 49 states to point out what’s wrong with California versus the ones … (whose) constituents have family and everybody else in these fire areas,” she said. “But at the same time, if I was them, I would say: ‘Hey, why did that happen? We are going to look at why it happened so it doesn’t happen again.’”
Most Republican members from California, while criticizing Newsom and Bass, wouldn’t explicitly say whether they want strings attached to the federal aid.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa, whose district sprawls across northeastern California, said on the House floor “nobody questions immediate help for the emergency phase” but stressed it is fair to demand accountability on the rebuilding process.
“We are helping people, and there will be help after, but it isn’t unreasonable to say: What does it take to put things back in a way that is going to be stronger and more resilient going forward, especially when we are talking about many, many billions?”
And Rep. Jay Obernolte, whose district covers just parts of eastern Los Angeles County, said he “strongly supports and anticipates” Congress to distribute relief dollars. But, he said, “the severity of these fires has been exacerbated by poor management at the state and local levels, and this should also be examined and addressed.”
Some members — often in more competitive districts — took a subtler tone.
Rep. David Valadao, a moderate Republican who in 2021 voted to impeach Trump, urged speedy disaster relief without mentioning any conditions. “The federal government must act quickly to save lives and homes, and once we know how much federal support California will require to rebuild, it is imperative we move as quickly as possible to deliver aid,” he said in a statement.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, who won re-election by 10 points in November, advocated on the House floor for a federal inquiry into “political failures that enabled this catastrophe” but stressed that it should not “stand in the way of getting immediate relief to the victims.” On Friday, he clarified to KCRA that he would not support tying aid to policy changes unrelated to wildfires.
And Rep. Ken Calvert — the dean of the delegation who won re-election by just a three-point margin — said on social media that Californians deserve federal disaster aid “in the same manner as all Americans,” but added that “some federal policy changes may be needed to expedite rebuilding as well as improve future wildfire prevention.” Those policies, he said, are not conditions.
LaMalfa and Central Valley Rep. Vince Fong were the only two members of California’s GOP delegation who did not respond to CalMatters’ questions to clarify their positions.
The mindset among most of them is to avoid clarifying their stances “until they are forced to make a choice,” said Eric Schickler, political science professor and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California-Berkeley.
“Trying to see if the politics clarify, see maybe leaders reach some sort of compromise so you never have to take that hard vote — for a lot of members that’s not courageous, but it makes political sense,” Schickler said.
But speaking up against Trump may not be costly for some, Ose said. The House majority is too narrow for the Republican Party to risk losing some incumbents in the next election cycle, and the losses could happen if those incumbents aren’t perceived to be catering to their constituents’ needs.
“They are going to cut slack for people like Calvert and Young Kim and others in California whose districts are critical to being able to implement the rest of the Trump agenda,” Ose said. “That gives people like Calvert and Kim negotiating leverage.”
Regardless of what those Republicans decide, however, they have no incentive to state their positions publicly, said GOP consultant Jon Fleischman.
“The objective for a Republican from California is to be in the discussion,” he said. “All this stuff happens behind closed doors and their job will be to make sure aid can come.”
That means their public statements may not be as important as they seem, Fleischman said.
“I think that the leadership, including the Speaker, gives plenty of latitude for members to say in the media whatever they need to say to stay in good stead with the people that will send them to Congress,” he said. “But I don’t think that what they say (into) a microphone is ultimately what’s going to influence what happens in the back rooms when determining how an aid package would be done and what would be in it.”
Yue Stella Yu, CalMatters
