Is this checkmate for climate change-denying governors?
It reminds me of when the Feds denied highway funding to any state that didn’t raise it’s drinking age.
Highly coercive, but effective.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’m in favor of this “coercive” federal policy. FEMA isn’t interested in paying to restore your human habitat if you’re not going to take any steps to mitigate the damage. Not bad at all.
More recently than the highway funding/drinking age deal, the feds thought nothing of coercing high schools into making their students available to military recruiters on demand, or federal funding would be withheld. At least there’s a link between FEMA’s disaster relief funds and the damage that could be mitigated by a state if they took climate change seriously.
Why should schools become the happy hunting ground for military recruiters? Doesn’t the military already have a big enough recruiting budget? They need personal access to each and every public high school student, telling them they’ll never cut it in college, so why not join up?
I await with relish the predictable yowling about “federal blackmail” from the usual quarters.
Is this checkmate for climate change-denying governors?
No!!!!!!!!! Why would it be? They’ll just cut funds to education and other things and blame it on the Democrats. After all, how many Teahadists governors are still holding out on the Medicaid expansion?
Now Florida’s working on a fake Medicaid expansion–they’ll charge premiums and institute work requirements–presumably so they can get the federal money while Scott can say he defeated Obama socialism. Maybe they can come up with some similarly poisoned way of keeping access to FEMA money.
Does that have a chance of being granted a waiver? I’d hope not.
Could. If the next POTUS is a Republican. Or a Democrat that barely wins but loses FL.
Is the federal government suggesting that policies should be enacted on the basis of objective facts and science? What a ludicrous concept.
As the state with by far the most federally insured flood insurance policies, Scott and his FL cohorts are playing a bad game of dice.
These Governors have proven repeatedly that they’re more than willing to waive federal funds to protect their strongly held beliefs and cover their backsides with their voting base. I’m not hopeful this will change anything.
Paint their helicopters black just for LOLs?
When a massive flood hits an area with a climate denying governor who hasn’t properly prepared his state for the consequences, the pressure on the federal government to help will be unrelenting and they will fold. Denying them help will probably not blow back on the governor, it will simply feed the “government is the problem” narrative that is already so deeply implanted in people’s brains.
Exactly.
To have an effect: deny federal flood insurance. Let the Free Market handle it!