Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) criticized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for invoking a football analogy in response to a question about blame for the triple-digit death toll resulting from the catastrophic flooding in the state over the July Fourth weekend.
“For the governor to treat this as if it were a football game, this is not a game. People’s lives are at stake, and there’s so much more that should have been done,” Doggett said Wednesday in an interview on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
Abbott was asked at a press conference Tuesday “who’s to blame” for failure to prepare for the scale of disaster seen Friday, but the governor pushed back on the question, saying, “That’s the word choice of losers.”
“Every football team makes mistakes,” Abbott said. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and then we’re going to win this game.’”
“The way winners talk is not to point fingers. They talk about solutions,” Abbott added.
Doggett on CNN highlighted the governor’s assessment of who the “losers” are in this situation.
“The losers are the ones that don’t learn from the mistakes, that don’t hold people accountable,” the congressman said.
Doggett pointed to reporting that Kerr County, where the majority of flood-related deaths occurred, declined to install a flood alert system when it had the opportunity to do so.
He also noted the questions about the Trump administration’s cuts at the National Weather Service and reporting that certain relevant positions had not been filled when heavy rains struck central Texas.
“In this case, I think there are accountable issues at every level of government. And as I mentioned, I think the impact of the Trump administration has to be considered,” Doggett said.
