Republicans Rip Joe Biden for Tying U.S. Disaster Relief to Ukraine Funding
Republicans are ripping President Joe Biden for attempting to tie U.S. disaster relief to Ukraine funding, asserting that the president is holding Americans “hostage.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is leading the charge, urging Congress to separate disaster relief in the U.S. from billions more in aid to Ukraine.
Biden this week was originally expected to request more aid for Ukraine, with a figure “north of $10 billion.” Indeed, according to the Associated Press (AP), Biden requested over $13 billion in “emergency defense aid to Ukraine and an additional $8 billion for humanitarian support through the end of the year.”
The $40-billion aid package includes $12 billion for disaster relief in the U.S. as well, triggering concerns among Republicans and prompting Rubio, who tends to support aid to Ukraine with more oversight, to take action.
“President Biden is holding Floridians and other Americans hostage by tying critical domestic disaster relief to foreign military aid,” Rubio stated on Thursday.
“While the Biden administration works with my colleagues in the House on what can actually pass, I urge prompt consideration of legislation to replenish the Disaster Relief Fund,” the Florida senator added, prompting agreement from fellow Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).
“Marco and I don’t always agree on Ukraine policy, but he is absolutely right about this. We have just had horrible fires in Maui. Biden still hasn’t declared a disaster in East Palestine, and hurricane season is just around the corner,” Vance said.
“Do disaster aid, then we can debate Ukraine,” Vance added.
Despite Rubio’s general support of aiding Ukraine, he is among those calling for far more oversight, halting the status of writing a “blank check.”
Biden’s desire to tie U.S. disaster relief to Ukraine aid comes as the people of East Palestine, Ohio, continue to seek assistance and beg for help months after the toxic train derailment. The Biden administration, however, has largely ignored them.
“Man, are they suffering. That’s another place in the United States that’s been forgotten about, just like the border, the people down there,” John Rourke, the head of Blue Line Moving who delivered pallets of water from former President Donald Trump to East Palestine residents, told Breitbart News during a July interview at the Turning Point Action Conference.
“We have American citizens, some of them veterans, who can’t even get a decent roof over their head until they figure out what the hell is going on in this town, alright; I was there. I could smell it in the air. I could feel it on my skin. I actually spoke with people. ‘How are you doing?’ And they’re miserable. They don’t understand why Joe Biden has not come down there and help them,” Rourke said, highlighting that it was Trump — not Biden — who showed up.
CLASS ACT: Donald Trump Visits with Americans at East Palestine McDonalds, Fact-Checkers Go BERSERK
Alana Mastrangelo / Breitbart News“But guess who had to come? President Trump, right? He’s the one that came. How bad is that?” Rourke asked, adding that he is still getting calls from residents asking him to send a message to Trump.
WATCH — Trump to East Palestine Residents: “You Are Not Forgotten”
Alana Mastrangelo / Breitbart News“These poor people just need water. I’m getting calls from people; even as last week, someone reached out to me and said, ‘We’re running out of water. Could you get a message to President Trump? He said he would come back if the government didn’t act. Could you please get a message to him and tell him we need more water? We need help,’” he said.
“They still need help. I’m telling you, they’re reaching out to us on social media, saying, ‘Is there any way you can get a message to anyone to come help us?’ It’s just a forgotten land, just like the border, just like all of these inner cities that are deteriorating and rotting from inside,” Rourke added.
WATCH — John Rourke: East Palestine Residents Still Begging for Help as Biden Ignores Them
Jack Knudsen / Breitbart NewsBiden’s attempt to tie U.S. disaster relief to Ukraine aid also comes as Hawaii experiences what Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) has described as “likely the largest natural disaster in Hawaii’s state history” after wildfires engulfed the islands, killing at least 53, with the death toll rising. Notably, Biden approved the state’s disaster declaration request Thursday.
VIDEO — Aerial Footage, Before & After Pictures Show Devastating Hawaii Wildfire
Biden-Harris to Pass on Visiting Maui: They ‘Don’t Want to Distract’ from Relief Efforts
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will not visit Maui in the aftermath of the deadly wildfires because they “don’t want to distract” from the relief efforts, Harris announced on Friday.
The wildfires, which began Tuesday and continue to blaze, have destroyed acres of property and taken dozens of lives. On Friday, local officials announced the death toll increased to 67, making it the deadliest wildfire on U.S. soil since the 2018 Camp Fire in California killed at least 85 people.
The wildfires have destroyed at least 2,000 acres of land, including 80 percent of the Maui town Lahaina, a rich cultural area that was once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Neither Biden nor Harris will visit the devastated Hawaiian island despite the destruction, according to Harris.
“We don’t want to distract from the resources that need to go in to the victims of this tragedy, and of course, the needs of the first responders have to be able to focus on that issue and not worry about focusing on us [because] we’re there,” Harris told reporters before boarding Air Force Two for Chicago.
“We are coordinating federal resources to swiftly get there to support the work in terms of recovery but to just support the folks on the ground. It is tragic,” she said, adding that she and Biden are “deeply concerned” about the wildfire.
Biden declared it a major disaster on Thursday, opening up federal aid for the impacted areas. The federal government has also released food and water to support 5,000 people for five days.
Gov. Josh Green (D) on Thursday cautioned that the death toll would rise “significantly” in the coming days.
Power, internet, and communication outages caused by the fire have significantly impacted rescue and relief efforts.
An aerial image taken on August 10, 2023, shows destroyed homes and buildings on the waterfront burned to the ground in Lahaina in the aftermath of wildfires in western Maui, Hawaii. (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
“We as a local nonprofit are not able to even access anything west of Maalaea. West Maui is completely cut off from communication and power,” said Maui Rescue Mission communications consultant Lauren Henrie. “We are looking at years, years of recovery here.”
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
Maui disaster sirens never sounded as deadly fire engulfed hundreds of homes
As the official death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 67 on Friday, questions are being raised about why Hawaii’s disaster warning system was never activated when the climate change-fueled inferno was spreading rapidly across the island.
According to a PBS report on Thursday, Hawaii emergency management records “show no indication that warning sirens sounded before people ran for their lives from wildfires on Maui,” and, instead, “officials sent alerts to mobile phones, televisions and radio stations—but widespread power and cellular outages may have limited their reach.”
Hawaii has what the state says is the largest integrated outdoor all-hazard public safety warning system in the world. This includes about 400 sirens across the archipelago to alert people to various natural disasters and other threats. The system was created in the aftermath of a tsunami that struck Hawaii in 1946 and killed more than 150 people.
Along with the fact that the sirens were not activated, according to a report by BBC on Friday, Maui officials issued contradictory information about the extent and danger of the flames as they were being whipped up Wednesday. The Maui County website issued a statement on Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. that said a brush fire had been “100% contained,” although “winds in the area remain a concern.”
In addition to “a warning to avoid blocked roads,” the BBC report said, “officials gave no further warnings,” regarding the situation in Lahaina until 4:45 p.m. local time, when the county said, “an apparent flare-up” of the fire had “caused the closure of a bypass near the town, as well as some evacuations.”
Further evacuations were announced later that afternoon, followed by an emergency declaration by Mayor Richard Bissen before 11:00 p.m. local time that night. Tourists in some hotels were instructed to remain in place to avoid clogging up local roads. However, by this time, flames driven by high winds from Hurricane Dora in the Pacific Ocean to the south of the islands had already engulfed parts of Lahaina, forcing some people to flee into the sea.
Even though conditions for the eruption of wildfires were well known and warned about, local, state and federal officials were completely unprepared for the intensity and speed of the devastation.
On Wednesday, acting Governor Sylvia Luke admitted as much during a press conference when she said, “We never anticipated in this state that a hurricane which did not make impact on our islands will cause this type of wildfires, wildfires that wiped out communities, wildfires that wiped out businesses, wildfires that destroyed homes.”
Adam Weintraub of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency told the Associated Press (AP) that the records do not show that Maui’s warning sirens were triggered when the Lahaina fire began on Tuesday. Weintraub said the county used emergency alerts sent to mobile phones, televisions and radio stations.
Brad Ventura, chief of the Maui Fire Department, said the fire moved so quickly from brush to neighborhoods that it was impossible to get messages to the emergency management agencies responsible for issuing the alerts. “What we experienced was such a fast-moving fire through the … initial neighborhood that caught fire they were basically self-evacuating with fairly little notice,” Ventura said.
Survivors told news media on Thursday that they did not hear any sirens or receive any warnings giving them enough time to prepare and only realized they were in danger when they saw the flames or heard nearby explosions.
The Maui wildfires are Hawaii’s deadliest disaster since a 1960 tsunami killed 61 people. Officials are warning that the death toll will continue to rise as search and rescue operations continue, and more victims are found.
Firefighters were still battling flames on parts of the island on Friday as rescue workers continued the work of trying to locate more than 1,000 people who are missing. Thousands of residents have been displaced by the fires that swept across the island and destroyed more than 1,700 structures and decimated the historic town of Lahaina.
With power and cellular service out in most areas, evacuation and search and rescue efforts have been made extremely difficult.
Another indication of the capitalist political establishment’s unpreparedness for the deadly wildfires is the fact that Maui’s firefighting staff is very small and ill-equipped for the events of Tuesday and Wednesday. Bobby Lee, the president of the Hawaii Firefighters Association, spoke to AP and said there are a maximum of 65 firefighters working at any given time in Maui County, and they are responsible for fighting fires on three islands: Maui, Molokai and Lanai.
The Maui crews have about 13 fire engines and two ladder trucks, all of which are designed for on-road use. The department does not have any off-road vehicles, which means fire crews are unable to attack brush fires thoroughly before they reach roads or populated areas, Lee said.
Meanwhile, more reports are emerging that government officials knew about the danger of rapidly spreading wildfires in Hawaii from the experience of Hurricane Lane in 2018. The storm, which narrowly missed making direct landfall with Hawaii, still inundated Hawaiian islands with flooding and whipped up wildfires that burned 3,000 acres across Maui and Oahu.
The fires fueled by winds from Lane were analyzed by a team of researchers from the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center. Their research was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society two years after that storm entitled, “Fire and Rain: The Legacy of Hurricane Lane in Hawaii.”
The researchers pointed to the confluence of conditions that would result from hurricane events in Hawaii. They said that further research was needed to determine whether hurricane-fire events were going to become more frequent. The research paper said, “A complete understating of these factors is critical to understanding the vulnerability of people and resources exposed during a severe weather event.”
Another document written in 2014 entitled the “Western Maui Community Wildfire Plan” identified West Maui as specifically susceptible to wildfires. Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the nonprofit Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization and a coauthor of the plan, said that the devastating Maui fire was foreseeable.
Pickett told Honolulu Civic Beat, “We keep hearing from certain elected officials and other people being quoted in the media, ‘we had no idea, this is unprecedented.’ But actually, those of us in the wildfire community, meaning our fire agencies, our forestry natural resource management community, we have long been working to increase our risk reduction efforts.”
Of course, most of the actions recommended by the scientists were either ignored or never fully implemented. Pickett said even though the Maui fire had multiple factors that complicated fire control efforts, more could have been done to prevent it ahead of time. She added that Hawaii’s policies, codes, enforcement and resources have not kept up with the accelerated threats.
“We know there’s high risk. We know the science, we have the data, we’ve done the assessments, we have the community programs in place. It might not have been 100% preventable, but it could have been mitigated. It could have been lessened,” Pickett said.
Kennedy Says Climate Change Activists, Skeptics Can ‘Unite’ Against Hawaii Fires
Democratic presidential challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the wildfires in Maui and elsewhere in Hawaii are a problem that can unite both activists and skeptics of climate change, because the underlying cause is poor environmental management.
In a series of tweets Friday, Kennedy cited reports that the devastating blazes were fueled by invasive grassland species that had grown on former farmland that had been abandoned.
Hawaii fires result from poor tending of the land. First, industrial ag plantations obliterated native ecosystems. When these farms were abandoned, combustible invasive grasses took over.https://t.co/WNEp5HnRIz
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2023
Climate change may be a factor too. But we must resist the seduction of a simplistic global explanation for every environmental problem. Top priority has to be on healing soil, forests, wetlands, rivers, and oceans, instead of treating them as resources to strip and waste dumps.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2023
Stop ruining land + water. Stop poisoning the earth. Protect what remains + regenerate what was damaged. Healthy ecosystems stabilize weather and mitigate flood-drought cycle. They also draw down carbon.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2023
Everyone can get behind land + water healing whatever their views on climate change.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2023
As President I am going to unite climate activists and skeptics in an environmental renaissance the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s. #Kennedy24
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2023
In a statement on Friday, Kennedy elaborated:
“My heart goes out to the people of Maui and the families who have lost loved ones.
“We need to stop ruining land and water and stop poisoning the earth. We need to protect what remains and regenerate what was damaged. Healthy ecosystems stabilize weather and mitigate the flood-drought cycle. They also draw down carbon.
“Environmental problems don’t always have a simplistic global cause. Earth is a complex system. Therefore, our top priority has to be on healing soil, forests, wetlands, rivers, and oceans, instead of treating them as resources to strip and waste dumps.
“I believe everyone can get behind land and water healing whatever their views on climate change.
“As President, I am going to unite climate activists and skeptics in an environmental renaissance the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s.”
Kennedy had also published a video the day before on the theme of unity, addressing political rifts within families:
Several members of his own family have opposed his presidential run, and some have even attacked him in public.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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