Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said on Monday that tying the debt limit to California aid for the recent deadly wildfires it has faced is “not meant as a penalty.”

Earlier in a conversation with NewsNation’s Blake Burman on “The Hill,” Burman asked Rounds about the potential of fire aid being “tied to increasing the debt limit.”

“I think it will have to be, because we simply can’t provide the assistance unless we have the ability to borrow the money to do so,” Rounds replied.

Rounds later added that “the secretary of the Treasury has already advised us that we are using extraordinary means in order to pay our bills, until such time as we increase the debt limit again.”

“It’s not meant as a penalty, or it’s not meant to slow down the delivery,” Rounds said, talking about the fire aid and debt limit connection. “It simply means that we’ll have to expedite the discussion about the debt ceiling.”

The recent Los Angeles-area fires have devastated the region, destroying property en masse and leaving a death toll in the double digits in their wake.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) floated on Monday, tying a debt limit increase to disaster aid for the state.

“There’s some discussion about that, but we’ll see where it goes,” Johnson told reporters when asked about debt limit legislation being a ridealong to a potential disaster aid package. 

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) also on Monday said that California doesn’t “deserve” funding after wildfires unless they “make some changes.”

“If you go to California, you run into a lot of Republicans, a lot of good people, and I hate it for them, but they are just overwhelmed by, by these inner-city woke policies with the people that vote for them,” Tuberville said on Newsmax’s “The Chris Salcedo Show,”

“And it … you know, I don’t mind sending them some money. But unless they show that they’re [going to] change their ways and get back to building dams and storing water, doing the — the maintenance with the brush and the trees and everything that everybody else does in the country, and they refuse to do it, they don’t deserve anything, to be honest with you, unless they show us they’re [going to] make some changes,” he added.

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