Texas Republican regrets his vote against disaster warning system

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now," state Rep. Wes Virdell told the Texas Tribune after a flood killed 90.

Texas State Rep. Wes Virdell (R)

Hi readers,

Thank you for bearing with a brief pause in Nightcap content last week so I could take a much needed summer vacation. While I didn’t necessarily plan to be out of the country for July 4th—my friend’s 40th birthday, which inspired the Euro-trip, happened to fall on the 3rd—I can’t say that I was disappointed to miss Independence Day celebrations this year. We’re certainly being liberated from our health care and basic rights in the United States these days, but that’s not exactly the kind of “freedom” that makes me want to bake a cake.

It appears that I missed a couple of incredibly depressing news developments when I was gone, including Republicans passing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which cuts Medicaid and food stamps in order to give ICE enough money to surpass all but 15 countries’ entire military budgets. Tellingly, the worst effects of the bill on red state voters and rural health care systems will be delayed until after the 2026 midterms, because Republicans know the legislation would be political suicide to campaign on.

But today I want to talk about something even less bearable, which is the tragic flooding in Hill Country Texas on Friday that has killed at least 91 people, including dozens of children. The death toll now includes at least 27 8-year-old girls and counselors from Camp Mystic, an elite Christian camp on the Guadalupe River where Laura Bush was once a counselor. Ten campers are still missing, according to the latest reporting, which must be absolute hell on earth for their parents.

Recovery workers dig through debris at Camp Mystic near Hunt, Texas, on Sunday. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

It feels incomprehensible that a summer rainstorm could catch us so off guard, in the richest country in the world in the year 2025, that it could drown nearly a hundred people overnight without warning. There appear to have been a perfect storm of factors: This was already known as the most dangerous river valley in the United States, nicknamed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its heavy rainfall and steep terrain; the water rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep; and the young campers, at least, were not allowed to have phones or devices that might have alerted them to any kind of weather warnings.

The warnings, themselves, also appear to have been insufficient. Texas officials issued flood alerts almost entirely via Facebook and Twitter/X, which no one is reading in the middle of the night, rather pushing emergency alerts with sound onto everyone’s phones. And just a few months ago, Texas’ Republican state legislature shot down a bill that would have improved Texas’ disaster response, including by funding better alert systems, new emergency communication equipment and radio towers. GOP State Rep. Wes Virdell, the former state director for Gun Owners of America who voted against that funding, says he now regrets it. “I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” he told the Texas Tribune. (It’s not like a similiar disaster happened in the same place in Texas in 1987, prompting the county to beg for more disaster response money for years—they simply couldn’t have seen this coming.)

On a larger scale, Donald Trump may also bear some responsibility for Texas’ inability to predict the severity of the floods. At the very least, he made things worse for these kinds of natural disasters to come. DOGE fired hundreds of meteorologists from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service earlier this year, and the Defense Department just announced that it would stop sharing satellite weather data with NOAA that monitors cloud formations, velocities, compositions and drifts. Meteorologists counted on that DoD satellite data, in particlar, to predict extreme hurricanes and weather events.

Trump also gutted FEMA at the beginning of hurricane season, nearly guaranteeing—along with the rest of his climate change acceleration policies—that more people will be dying in catastrophic weather events in the next four years than we’ve ever seen under a president.

When asked about the Texas floods, Trump panicked and mumbled gibberish about Joe Biden .

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana’s greatest embarrassment, added yesterday that there’s nothing anyone can do but “pray.”

Unfortunately, praying is not on the list of actions that might reasonably help find the missing Camp Mystic girls, support the families who have lost loved ones and had their homes and lives ruined by this flood, and help us improve the country’s ability to anticipate and mitigate these kinds of extreme events going forward.

All I really want to add about politics regarding the Texas floods is this: If you’re inclined, as some liberals on social media have been, to suggest in any kind of way that the people of Texas “asked for this” because of their votes in November, you and I have nothing in common. No child asked to die in a flood. No parent deserves to have their 8-year-old daughter returned home from summer camp in a body bag because of how they voted in an election. This is not a red state versus blue state thing. I grew up in a red state and went to summer camp in Mississippi, and I can’t imagine someone telling my parents—who don’t happen to be Republicans, though that shouldn’t really matter—that they deserved it if some freak natural disaster disappeared me in the middle of the night.

Instead, why don’t we all agree to blame the greedy oil executives and billionaire authoritarians trying to kill science and stop the flow of information in order to line their own pockets, at the expense of the planet and people’s lives. Shame the politicians, not the people they oppress. I have a feeling the votes are going to look very different in 2026—even in Texas.