The reality of President Musk’s tenure is starting to hit home in red states, with their senators having to beg the administration for the federal money promised to them. For example, West Virginia:
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) said she’s been “aggressively” working the EPA and its administrator, Lee Zeldin, to unfreeze grants for green school buses that are manufactured in her state. Capito said she has been bombarded by questions about the freezes, but has faith overall that “good programs” will eventually be unfrozen.
“Trimming fat out of government, we all know it needs to be done,” Capito said. But she added that the confusion generated by the freezes has hit some in her community hard. “The uncertainty, I think, is difficult, especially small businesses and school systems, arts councils — all those things,” she said.
Feeling the heat at home, Shelley? Good.
Earlier this week, parts of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia had deadly flash flooding, and here in WV sadly there have been 3 deaths. There is also no money in the state for all of the emergency response or for the rebuilding because although our former waste of carbon governor, Jim Justice (who is now our current waste of carbon junior senator) said that the state was on a “rocket ship ride” for success, his successor Patrick Morrisey informed us that the state has a $400 million budget shortfall. Who is lying? Why not both of them? They’re both Republicans, after all.
And it’s Republicans who have allowed this terrible tragedy to happen over and over. Morrisey, a carpetbagger from New Jersey, simply does not give a shit about poor people in WV:
As communities across the southern coalfields grapple with the destruction caused by severe flooding after hours of heavy rains, the program created by West Virginia lawmakers to help prevent damage from the natural disasters sits unfunded.
And last week, days before the deadly floods, Gov. Patrick Morrisey did not ask for any funding for it in his proposed budget.
But we can’t just blame him—this all also sits squarely on the shoulders of Justice and the WV GOP which has a stranglehold on the state legislature:
Deadly flooding in 2016 renewed efforts by West Virginia leaders to address the problem, prompting the creation of the State Resiliency Office in 2017. Lawmakers later designated a special trust fund in 2023 to help the office protect communities, especially those with low-income households, from flooding as well as implement recommendations from an updated state flood plan the office completed in June 2024.
But lawmakers have never allocated money to that fund.
Robert Martin, director of the State Resiliency Office, told a legislative committee in December 2023 that there were “probably projects right now we’d be able to execute if we had what we were looking to do either with federal or state dollars.”
In his last budget proposal as governor last year, Sen. Jim Justice asked the Legislature for $50 million for the flood resiliency fund. But as lawmakers hammered out the budget, they rejected Justice’s request, leaving the fund empty again.
As of last November, the office was still looking to secure funding.
Morrisey’s deputy press secretary did not respond to questions about why the governor did not request money for the fund or whether he would revisit the decision given the damage over the last few days.
In The Good Old Days the federal government would be on the scene in the guise of FEMA, with short and long term help for flood victims. But those days are gone. The governor asked for a federal disaster designation on Monday and the response has been…silence.
When asked whether Morrisey was concerned about such pushes at the federal level — especially in light of West Virginia’s recent (and historic) needs — the governor said he was “not going to get into any of those issues right now.”
“I want to make sure that we have systems that work at the local level, that work at the state level, and then I want to partner effectively with the relevant folks on the federal side as well,” Morrisey said. “I’m going to focus on what’s the readiness, the preparedness, that we have right here in West Virginia.”
Morrisey, Capito, Justice, and WV’s 2 House reps, Carol Miller and my useless rep Riley Moore, have all been furiously licking President Grievance’s boots for months now. It’s been kind of uncomfortable to watch. And now they’re learning first hand that it doesn’t matter—and more importantly that they don’t matter. And soon the WV MAGAts will learn the same hard truth.
Fools, all of them: