In just 45 minutes, early Friday morning, intense rain caused sections of the Guadalupe River in Central Texas to rise by nearly 26 feet. Four months’ worth of rain dropped within hours. More than 100 people had been confirmed dead as of late Monday afternoon, including more than two dozen campers and counselors at a riverside Christian summer camp. As the search for victims and survivors continues, more heavy rain is expected this week.

When a tragedy of such proportions occurs, the temptation to point fingers is strong. Some Republican officials in Texas have found their scapegoat in the National Weather Service, which they’ve accused of failing to predict the storm’s full intensity. They’ve got the wrong guys; despite grappling with deep cuts imposed by the Trump administration, the NWS put out early and increasingly urgent warnings about the coming deluge. There’s plenty of blame to go around, though. Democrats, accordingly, should do a lot more than call for investigations into how White House attacks on the NWS might have hampered preparedness efforts. They should connect the dots, again and again, between Republican policy and its lethal consequences. Democrats should hammer Republicans not just for undermining Texas’s and America’s disaster preparedness and response infrastructure but for having spent decades blocking efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. GOP lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. The more say that the Republican Party has over governing a climate-changed world, the more people will die.

The NWS is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric........

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