Canine-killing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem fearmongered in regards to the menace immigrants pose to america and lied in regards to the California wildfires in the course of the affirmation listening to for her nomination to guide the Division of Homeland Safety Friday.
As head of DHS, Noem can be answerable for Customs and Border Patrol and the Federal Emergency Administration Company, which helps reply to pure and artifical disasters. Her solutions about how she would deal with each of these areas ought to scare everybody.
In the course of the listening to, Noem lied that the U.S. border is “open,” and claimed that “the No. 1 menace to our homeland safety is the southern border.”
After all, the border is clearly not open. In reality, border crossings have dramatically declined in latest months, attaining comparable ranges as these throughout Donald Trump’s first time period.
What’s extra, the top of the FBI has truly mentioned that homegrown extremists are the largest terror menace, and that China’s cyber program and its influence on U.S. infrastructure is an even bigger hazard to america than immigrants crossing the border.
Other than fearmongering about immigrants, Noem additionally refused to say whether or not she’d withhold catastrophe aid if Trump requested her to—a related query as Trump and Republicans have mentioned California mustn’t obtain monetary help to assist get well from the devastating fires.
“If President Trump have been to say to you, ‘We’re going to withhold cash from Connecticut or Michigan or any of the states, Iowa, as a result of we don’t just like the governor or we don’t just like the politics of the state,’ you’ll stand as much as him and say, ‘Mr. President, we need to allocate that money’?” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, requested Noem.
She refused to reply, saying that she could not reply a hypothetical query.
But it surely’s not hypothetical, since Trump tried to do exactly that throughout his first time period, when California was reeling from one other wave of devastating wildfires.
As Politico reported in October:
Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience coverage on the Nationwide Safety Council employees, informed E&E Information on Wednesday that Trump initially refused to approve catastrophe support for California after lethal wildfires in 2018 due to the state’s Democratic leanings.
However Harvey mentioned Trump modified his thoughts after Harvey pulled voting outcomes to indicate him that closely broken Orange County, California, had extra Trump supporters than your entire state of Iowa.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” mentioned Harvey, who just lately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside greater than 100 different Republican former nationwide safety officers.
“I assume you agree, withholding disaster relief is a violation of duty and law,” Blumenthal pressed Noam.
“Leadership has consequences,” she mentioned in a chilling response.
Noem went on to lie in regards to the response to California’s wildfires, claiming that in some way Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is chargeable for the devastating impacts of this pure catastrophe—echoing the baseless claims of Trump and different Republicans.
“I wish we would have had different leadership or a different governor in California,” Noem mentioned.
Nevertheless, firefighters say that people couldn’t have stopped the fires that ravaged the state.
“Wildfires like this, driven by 70 to 100 mph winds, couldn’t be ‘put out’ if every firefighter in the West were in Los Angeles,” retired firefighter Riva Duncan wrote in an op-ed for MSNBC.
And, as UCLA water useful resource professional Greg Pierce informed CNN, “I don’t know a water system in the world that is … prepared for this type of event.”
