Flooding is an obvious issue, but it’s hardly the only one.
Lizzie Fletcher
After Hurricane Harvey flooded much of Houston – including the hotly contested Seventh Congressional District – Republican incumbent John Culberson used his position on the House Appropriations Committee to stamp his name on billions of dollars in disaster recovery funds.
By February, he could claim a leading hand in securing $141 billion in congressional appropriations to help the victims of the 2017 hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.
But as the nine-term congressman faces an unusually tough reelection against Democratic challenger Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, the city’s troubled history of flooding and the federal government’s long backlog of flood control projects has come under sharp political attack.
Fletcher, a Houston attorney making her first run for office, argues that Houstonians are paying the price for Culberson’s small government philosophy and a Republican-led Congress that she says has been slow to fund critical improvements to the Addicks and Barker dams, both aging structures that were deemed to be at “high risk” of failure as early as 2004.
She also has homed in on key votes cast by Culberson, who she labels a climate change skeptic, saying that they undermined flood prevention efforts in Texas and across the country.
“We can’t just look at the last nine months,” she said in an interview. “We need to look at the last nine terms.”
It’s a long story and I encourage you to read the whole thing. Culberson has done some things and was the only Texas Republican to avoid making himself a sniveling hypocrite when he supported federal relief funds for New York and New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy, but the fact that the rest of his caucus opposed such funds, and the fact that his party has so greatly prioritized cutting taxes and slashing spending over investing in infrastructure and solving problems just highlights why he doesn’t deserve a pass for a handful of decent votes. He’s part of the problem regardless, and the only way forward is a change of leadership in Congress. He can push the occasional bill and make the odd budget appropriation, but as long as he’s a vote for a Republican Speaker and a body in the count for a Republican House majority, nothing’s going to get done.
All this said, health care was the issue everyone was talking about earlier on, when the House – including John Culberson – was trying to kill the Affordable Care Act. That battle has shifted from Congress to the courthouse again, and that should bring this issue, on which Democrats enjoy an electoral advantage, to the fore. It’s never going to be a bad idea to remind people that Culberson has worked tirelessly to take their health care away. And since we’re only ever allowed to talk about mental illness when there’s another mass shooting, it’s also always a good time to remind people that the single biggest thing Texas can do to boost mental health care is to accept Medicaid expansion, which again John Culberson opposes with every fiber of his being. Flooding is a great and vital issue, with lots to talk about, but it’s not the only one.