The further we get from the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the more former FEMA director Michael Brown seems willing to share. His latest remarks are of particular interest.
Party politics played a role in decisions over whether to take federal control of Louisiana and other areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, former FEMA director Michael Brown said Friday.
Some in the White House suggested only Louisiana should be federalized because it was run by a Democrat, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Brown told a group of graduate students at a lecture on politics and emergency management at Metropolitan College of New York.
Brown said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the hurricane be federalized, making the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster.
“Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking ‘We had to federalize Louisiana because she’s a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,” he said.
Who, exactly, argued this position in the White House? Brown wouldn’t say, adding only that he’d learned of the Bush gang’s position through Blanco’s office and from other officials on the federal level.
It sounds like the kind of information that could be explored in more detail in, say, a congressional committee hearing. If only there was some kind of committee in charge of government oversight, chaired by a senator who promised to follow through and do his due diligence in holding the administration responsible for its Katrina-related failures.
Instead, we have Joe Lieberman.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat [sic] to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. […]
[T]he decision by Lieberman, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to back away from the committee’s Katrina probe is already dismaying public-interest groups and others who hoped the Democratic victory in November would lead to more aggressive investigations of one of the White House’s most spectacular foul-ups.
Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush.
Asserting that there were “too many important questions that cannot be answered,” Lieberman and other committee Democrats complained in a statement last year that the panel “did not receive information or documents showing what actually was going on in the White House.”
If Dems expand their Senate majority in 2008, the first thing the caucus has to do — the very first thing — has to be to strip Lieberman of his committee chairmanship. At that point, if he decides to caucus with the Republicans, it won’t matter.