The Republican campaign trail has been oddly silent about one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory. Aside from a few unspecific, lukewarm (and in this case, hypocritical) responses like Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s in debates, the field has been pretty quiet about the lead crisis in Flint, a middle-class city in a key state. That’s probably because so many of the bad government actors in the crisis have been in the administration of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican.
However, facts just roll off the back of newly crowned Emperor of Iowa (that’s how that works, right?) Ted Cruz like water on a duck. Yesterday, in a speech in New Hampshire, Cruz blamed the entire crisis on local Democrats and implied that their party politics were the reason for homes being poisoned by lead. Here are Cruz’s comments according to MSNBC:
You know, you look at what’s happening in Flint. Flint is an absolute outrage. You’ve got your own government poisoning the citizens. You look at the basic responsibilities of government, making sure our water’s clean is really near the top. I mean, we’re not talking rocket science here. This isn’t even broadband Internet. This is, ‘Don’t have the water coming out of my sink poison me.’
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You know, there’s an interesting parallel between Flint and New Orleans. Both cities have been governed with one-party government control of far-left Democrats for decades.
That’s a terrible parallel. The response to Katrina was terrible at all levels of government, and the thing about hurricanes and once-in-a-generation storm surges is they are unpredictable and unpreventable. However, the lead crisis in Flint was caused by people—largely people at the state level under Snyder’s administration who guided the city to switching to the Flint River and who (at the MDEQ) ensured that tests would never show elevated lead in the water.
But the local government didn’t have any power at all in the first place because of Snyder’s move to install emergency managers in Flint who answer only to the governor and entirely circumvent the power of locally elected officials. So Cruz is entirely wrong, but when has that ever stopped him before?