The Chicago Tribune on how Trump must stop playing politics with disaster aid to California:

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in late August 2005, it took Congress just a few days to approve $10.5 billion in federal disaster aid at President George W. Bush’s request. Lawmakers cleared another $51.8 billion less than two weeks later. There certainly were questions about what the state of Louisiana had — or hadn’t — done to protect its most populous city from such a disaster, as well as the response afterward. But President Bush and Congress didn’t indulge in such second-guessing before doing their immediate best to provide as much financial help as possible in Louisiana’s desperate time of need. And there wasn’t even a whisper of using the disaster as a means of extracting policy concessions from members of the other party. Louisianans were fellow Americans and needed help immediately. Period.

So the talk among President Donald Trump and some fellow Republicans in Congress of attempting to find points of leverage in what will be a monumental recovery effort from the wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles is, frankly, un-American. And it needs to stop.

Speaking earlier this week on Sean Hannity’s show, Trump said, “I don’t think we should give California anything until they let the water run down,” referring apparently to a disputed narrative Trump has proffered that California’s water policies for the northern part of the state are depriving the southern half of water.

Worse yet, House Speaker Mike Johnson, representing Louisiana itself, had the temerity to bluntly say he favored imposing conditions on help to California. Louisiana and New Orleans were accused of poor design of levees that were supposed to protect the city and failed.

No one at the time said those mistakes should make aid contingent on various policy changes. We venture to say no one, in fact, even contemplated such a move. Americans were horrified at the human misery in New Orleans and wanted to do what they could to help, at least in the short term.

If they follow through on trying to extract concessions from political foes, Trump, Johnson and others will hurt regular people who have lost everything in the fires.

Few will dispute that California needs to learn from the horrors L.A. is experiencing to gird against future wildfires.

There’s been discussion, for example, of building homes with more fire-retardant materials..

It’s up to members of Congress, both Democratic and Republican, to reaffirm that power politics has no place in recovering from natural disasters. This country badly needs to find areas of bipartisan agreement and places in which we affirm our status as fellow citizens, whatever our political beliefs.

Disaster aid to states strikes us as a good place to start.