After Congress created an investigatory committee to review what went wrong in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the White House pledged cooperation. But like so many Bush promises, the assurances were meaningless.
The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response. […]
The White House’s stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.
“There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do,” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.
The announcement that the administration would not cooperate with Congress came a day after reports indicated that the White House was told before Katrina hit that the city would likely be flooded by breached levees — contradicting public statements from the president that no one “anticipated the breach of the levees.”
This sets up a key showdown between the White House and Congress. If ever there was a gut-check opportunity for lawmakers, this is it.
Last fall, the Bush gang blew off requests for documents — relating in particular to communication records between agencies during the crisis — prompting House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.) to say he was “ready to proceed with subpoenas.” True to form, Davis backed down shortly thereafter.
Now, it’s official. Congress wants records from an administration that badly flubbed a response to a disaster. The administration is refusing to answer questions and, in the process, is thumbing its nose at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. What are lawmakers prepared to do about it?
When this special committee was created in Katrina’s wake, congressional Dems initially refused to participate because they assumed Republicans would be afraid to push the administration, even when necessary. This is a chance for the GOP to prove Dems wrong.
Here’s the only question congressional Republicans need to ask themselves in an intellectually serious way: What would they do if this were a Democratic president?