Politics & Power Quote by Stephanie Tubbs Jones

A polite sentence, but it carries the hard edge of a warning: democracy after disaster is not self-executing. Stephanie Tubbs Jones is talking about Louisiana in the loaded post-Katrina register, where “what will occur in the area” isn’t vague at all. It’s code for redevelopment, zoning, public housing, school systems, and the political map itself. Who gets to come back decides what the city becomes. So voting isn’t a civic nicety here; it’s the mechanism that prevents “rebuilding” from turning into a quiet transfer of power and property.

Her intent is explicitly federalist in the best sense: the federal government caused, worsened, and then managed the crisis, so it can’t wash its hands of the democratic aftermath. The phrasing “really should be supporting” reads as restrained, but it’s doing tactical work. Instead of accusing anyone outright, she frames federal involvement as baseline responsibility, which makes noninvolvement look like abandonment.

The subtext is about displacement and disfranchisement. After Katrina, many residents-mostly Black and poor-were scattered across states, stripped of documents, stability, and sometimes a reachable polling place. “Every person from that area” insists that citizenship follows people, not zip codes. It’s a push against the idea that those who stayed (or returned fastest, or had resources) get to define the future unilaterally.

Jones also ties legitimacy to process. If the federal response is to be more than logistics and photo ops, it has to safeguard political voice. Otherwise, the storm becomes an excuse to redraw Louisiana without Louisianans.