There are, of course, two sides to the debacle that led Mike Brown to become the director of FEMA. One was the president deciding to nominate him and the other was the Senate — which had a Dem majority at the time — going along with the idea.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, the Committee on Governmental Affairs, led at the time by Joe Lieberman, devoted all of 42 minutes to Brown’s confirmation hearing<\/a> in June 2002. A whopping five members of the committee bothered to show up, and none of them gave Brown much of a grilling. Shortly thereafter, Brown was confirmed on a voice vote with no recorded opposition.<\/p>\n So, does this mean the Senate is just as responsible for this mess as the president? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n Clearly, the Senate did not do its due diligence when it came to reviewing Brown’s skills and qualifications. It should have. But I suspect there was probably a feeling lawmakers felt in 2002 that they’ve long since lost: trust.<\/p>\n Senators probably assumed that the president would want a capable director for FEMA. They assumed Brown was a good choice, in large part because Bush picked him. After all, it’s not as if the typical senator could have guessed that the president would nominate someone who lied<\/a> about his background, failed<\/a> at every professional endeavor he ever tried, and knew literally nothing<\/a> about overseeing emergency management. In other words, the Senate counted on Bush to know what he was doing. <\/p>\n Is the right really prepared to argue, “Dems in the Senate were fools because they listened to Bush”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are, of course, two sides to the debacle that led Mike Brown to become the director of FEMA. One was the president deciding to nominate him and the other was the Senate — which had a Dem majority at the time — going along with the idea. As it turns out, the Committee on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}