Reason Hit and Run[*1] writes on the core of the fouled-up Katrina response, pointing out that there were and are real impediments to bringing the full capabilities of the Federal Government to bear on the recovery effort. This isn’t an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussion, either, but one with extreme ramifications for our republican/federal form of government:
Bush could have federalized the relief effort, but had Blanco rejected this, it could have created the kind of state vs. federal crisis that the U.S. hadn’t seen since the civil rights era–though the context was obviously quite different.
So, there was a giant screw-up because most people were too busy reading the fine print to figure out what to really do. But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff didn’t help things by being quoted as saying: “The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe.”
One of have thought that the “traditional model” of disaster relief, even short of an ultra-catastrophe, meant precisely knowing how to engage in massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood.
Opinion Journal[*2] takes a look at the issue too:
The media message was “do something!” In fact, the president does have “do something” authority. It’s called the Insurrection Act, which is what John Kennedy used in 1963 against Gov. George Wallace, ordering the governor’s own National Guard to turn against him and forcibly integrate the University of Alabama. As to the looters, who were breaking no evident federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 explicitly forbids using the military (unless a governor uses her National Guard under “state status”) in a domestic police function.
The question raised by the Katrina fiasco–and by the Pentagon’s new Homeland Defense Strategy to protect against WMD attack–is whether the threat from madmen and nature is now sufficiently huge in its potential horror and unacceptable loss that we should modify existing jurisdictional authority to give the Pentagon functional first-responder status. Should we repeal or modify the Posse Comitatus Act so homicidal thugs have more to fear than the Keystone Kops? Should a governor be able to phone the Defense Secretary direct, creating a kind of “yellow-light authority” and cutting out the Homeland Security or FEMA middleman? Should presidential initiative extend beyond the Insurrection Act?
These are the deadly serious questions we need to ask in the Katrina aftermath instead of dwelling on paranoid ravings about racism and rabid Bush-hating.
