What Does Sen. Martha McSally have against Puerto Rico?

Senator McSally is one of only 8 Senators to vote in opposition to HR 2157, providing more than $19 billion in additional funding to disaster-related Federal agencies: the money is expected to help redress the imbalance in disaster aid received between Puerto Rico and several U.S. States.

What does McSally have against Puerto Rico that she would go out of her way to vote NO on a broadly bi-partisan bill? I think McSally owes us an explanation of why she voted NO on this bill. No mentions of this subject on her Senate website, press releases, or twitter feeds as of the time of this post.

Unless the Senator has a compelling reason to oppose this bill, we are left to speculate about her motives for such an obviously out-of-touch vote (both with her State and her own caucus!). If anyone has a theory, leave a comment.

I suspect that she will explain by latching onto some controversy during the negotiation at which time she decided she could no longer support the bill on some principle or another; but her vote also says that just Puerto Rico doesn’t matter as much to Senator McSally as do the CONUS states. A rational position for McSally, perhaps, but an inhumane one.

UPDATE, 6pm:

McSally tweeted on the issue.

“There is an ongoing disaster at our border — in the past 5 months over 32k migrants have been released into AZ. I support helping those who are impacted by disasters, but won’t ask Arizonans to pay for disasters in other states without funding the disaster in our backyard.”

McSally seeks to link two completely different situations by calling asylum seekers at the Mexican border a “disaster”. They are human beings in need, not disasters. If a humanitarian crisis can be said to exist on the southern border it is as a result of the monstrous indifference to suffering of the Trump Administration, not because of anything the refugees are doing.

Has McSally any pending bills held up that address this lack of funding for the “disaster” in “our” (presumably meaning her home state of Arizona) backyard? I suspect that there may be a bill to repay the cost of housing illegal immigrants in border county jails and state prisons that is jammed in some committee or another. But otherwise, this is just symbolic vote by which McSally is pandering to her more nativist/racist base who might be mad enough to mentally equate a humanitarian challenge with a natural disaster.

McSally wants you to believe that this vote was symbolic of her dedication to her home state, I think it’s symbolic of the sort of racist politics that has become all too common since the Trumpening. McSally clearly thinks that her obnoxious comparison between fellow human beings asking for help and the ravages of fire, storm and flood adequately explains her vote. I think it ironically says more about McSally and her politics than she really intended.