more on FEMA Had Authority to Act, even without Emergency Declaration; So what?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Munro, Neil" <NMunro () nationaljournal com>
Date: September 13, 2005 3:53:12 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] FEMA Had Authority to Act, even without Emergency  
Declaration; So what?



    The President has many extraordinary powers, but doesn't usually
use them until there's no alternative.
    The question to consider is whether the feds should have seen
the need to take over the collapsing state & local operation earlier.
    One possible answer is that the feds should have done it years
ago. After all, the city and state had never practiced how they would
evacuate the city's poor. They had not even drawn up detailed plans for
where those poor would go.

    To see how difficult even that planning task was, let's put
ourselves in the planners & politicians place for a minute.
    Assume is 2004, and we decide that 100,000 people need to be
evacuated from New Orleans on buses. The other 400,000 will drive
themselves to towns and cities in the region.
    But the 100,000 are nearly all poor. Most have few skills. Many
women have dependent children but no husband. Many are old, and many
have chronic ailments, such as diabetes or the afflictions of old age.
Many have pets. Many have friendships, and all have some possessions.
Few have savings. It is also impossible to segregate out the criminal
offenders who have elevated New Orleans' murder rate to roughly 10 times
the average of similar-sized cities.
    Now name an elected major in a small-town - of whatever party -
who would volunteer to accept 1,000 of these unfortunates in the years
before the storm hits.
    Bear in mind, please, that the mayor would reasonably have to
fear a big impact on the local school budget and local employment and
local housing, as well as a possible uptick in local crime. And if extra
state and federal funding doesn't immediately accompany the movement of
the unfortunates, the town's budget would be wrecked. And, many of the
roughly 400,000 other, better-off, citizens of New Orleans might also be
looking for lodgings, classrooms, and medical aid in the same towns.
    No? Can't name even one mayor who would volunteer for this task
in the tranquil years and months before the storm?
    Assuming the mayors do not step forward, can you imagine the
governor and legislature telling the local politicians and residents of
50 small towns that they much each accept 1,000 unfortunates? And then
telling the bigger cities and towns to absorb the remaining 50,000? With
an election two years away?
    Given the practical impossibility of dealing with this political
problem before the disaster, we should hardly be surprised that the
city's mayor and the state's governor - both Democrats, FWIW - had no
real evacuation plan for the 100,000. So they hemmed and hawed as the
crisis rushed upon them, let buses sit until they were flooded, and then
simultaneously sent food to the Superdome and blocked the movement of
food to the Superdome, and also urged people to congregate at the
Superdome for evacuation even as they failed to get buses for an
evacuation until two days afterwards.
    Many IP-readers might say the feds should have stepped in to
take over the job, even years before. Perhaps, but can anyone imagine
Bill Clinton stepping in to decide where those 100,000 unfortunates
should go? We should hardly have expected Bush to get directly involved
in 2003 and 2004, and we cannot imagine that FEMA had the political
power to solve the evacuation problem. If FEMA had tried, the state's
Senators and Representatives would have .... voiced their concern.
    Next, given the, er, incomplete nature of New Orleans' planning
(I've heard nothing of poor planning in the adjacent states) how
realistic would it have been for the feds to shove aside local police,
local officials, local emergency workers, etc. in the day or three
before the storm, when there was no alternative plan but to rely on the
locals' (incomplete) plan? Does anyone think the feds would have
improved their performance by issuing orders to a collapsing state &
local infrastructure? One-third of the police deserted even without the
feds intrusion, and that intrusion might have provoked direct or passive
opposition from local officials and planners.
    Some evidence for that alternative history can be found in
reality, because the NYT reported that the White House and the governor
spent a day or three arguing over legal authority and the state guard.
If the feds had just declared they were taking over, those disagreements
might have been even worse.
    OK, now let's apply this analysis to something else - maybe a
really big earthquake in California, or major damage to the electricity
grid.
    If you think the feds could have solved the New Orleans problem,
then surely you think the feds should be ready to take over afte ran
earthquake.    In a spirit of generosity, I'll give you two years to
collect the approvals and forward the plans to the feds. That should
give you plenty of time to get mayors in California, Arizona, Oregon and
New Mexico to prepare for the evacuation of several million people from
Los Angeles, or plenty of time for you to persuade the feds to impose an
answer on the uncooperative mayors and governors. I'll give you an extra
month to get the endorsement of the states' federal Senators and
legislators.
    Monday-morning quarterbacking is easy. Politics is hard.

    Neil













-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 11:02 AM
To: Ip Ip
Subject: [IP] FEMA Had Authority to Act, even without Emergency
Declaration



Begin forwarded message:

From: John Lyon <jelyon () mac com>
Date: September 13, 2005 5:08:31 AM EDT
To: "dave () farber net" <dave () farber net>
Subject: [For IP] FEMA Had Authority to Act, even without Emergency
Declaration


For IP, if appropriate. It's a transcript of the prologue from last
weekend's public radio program "This American Life." <http://
thislife.org>.

Ira Glass: OK,  in the coming weeks and months we're all going to be
hearing
so much about hurricane Katrina, and why the government's response
was so
abysmal. And already the blame shifting is like this prize fight that's
already in it's third or fourth round.

Already we've heard officials try to shrug off any attempts of
accountability by saying it's too soon, by saying we're not going to
play
the "blame game."

And before the million details, and arguments and counter arguments
start to
make all of our heads woozy, I would just like to repeat here, something
that was talked about very briefly this week.

One of those things that seems so fundamental, that seems to cut
through a
lot this supposed debate that's happening and end it definitively. So
much
so that when I would see people on TV posturing and trotting out the
talking
points, I kept wanting to go back and say "Nonononono, don't forget this
thing."

It has to do with the biggest argument out there right now.

Whether the federal government was in fact supposed to be in charge of
rescuing people and getting food and water and all that to New
Orleans. It's
come up a lot, like when the head of Homeland Security Michael
Chertoff was
asked by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, "Since you knew the storm was
coming, why didn't you get buses and trains and planes and trucks in
there
to evacuate?"

Chertoff...said it wasn't his job.

Chertoff: Tim, the the way that, that that emergency operations act
under,
under the law is, the responsibility, and the, the uh power, the
authority
rests with the state and local officials.

Glass: This idea, that it was state and local officials who were the
ones
who blew it, not the feds, this idea is all over place.

 From the talking heads on TV, to Rush Limbaugh:

Limbaugh: What we had down there was eminent failure of state and local
government. We had incompetence in the mayor's office, incompetence
in the
governor's office.

Glass: And sure, it is clear, even this early, that there are plenty of
things that state and local government did to screw things up.

But here's this thing that I read this week, this thing that I kept
thinking
about all week. It really comes down to a couple of basic facts.

The governor of Louisiana declares a state of emergency, the Friday
before
the storm hits, right? Calls on the federal government to step in.

Then President Bush officially declares a state of emergency in
Louisiana,
the next day, Saturday before the storm, and authorizes the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to act.

You can read the paper where he does this on the White House website.

Basically, that should have settled who was in charge.

Nicholson: After that happened, there was plenty of authority. There
was all
the authority in the world.

Glass: We checked it out this idea that, from that point, the federal
government was in fact in charge. We checked it out with several
different
experts and consultants on these issues this week.

And they all agree that the law is unambiguous.

This particular guy is William Nicholson, author of the books "Emergency
Response and Emergency Management Law" and "Homeland Security Law and
Policy." And if you're into Homeland Security policy, you might want to
check those out.

He says that once the governor asks for help, and the president
declares a
state of emergency, the feds basically have the broad powers to do
what's
necessary.

And, he says, even if the President hadn't declared a state of
emergency,
the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chertoff, could have
acted.

There's this whole newfangled way for him to take emergency powers under
something called the National Response Plan.

Nicholson: Well, basically, the way it works is, the Secretary of
Homeland
security designates this as a catastrophic incident, and federal
resources
deploy to preset federal locations or staging areas, and, so they
don't even
have to have a local or state declaration in order to, uh, move
forward with
this.

Glass: In other words, it doesn't matter what the governor says, it
doesn't
matter what the local people say, basically, once that happens, they can
just go ahead and do, what needs to be done to fix the problem.

Nicholson: That's correct. It's utterly clear that they had the
authority to
preposition assets and to significantly accelerate the federal response.

Glass: And they didn't need to wait for the state?

Nicholson: They did *not* need to wait for the state.

Glass: Remember, you heard it here first.

Remember you heard it at all.
--
John Lyon | http://surlyedition.com

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor crackers land."
   -- Randy Newman, "Louisiana, 1927"




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