buggery | '...it becomes necessary for one people...'

Two days ago,

thete1 posted a Katrina-related entry on her journal entitled, 'When in the course of human events...' This post follows hers, in much the same way that the one phrase follows the other in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, from the signing of which Americans date the birth of our nation.

I chose to leave out, for now, the next few words, 'to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,' because we're still not at that point, yet.

But we're closer.

The Bush administration on Friday asked Blanco to give the president control of local law enforcement and the Louisiana National Guard that now answer to the governor. Blanco refused.

Blanco said, when asked about the issue of federalizing state troops, that the issue involves the hurricane recovery organizational structure, not how rescuers are deployed.

Blanco said she needs flexibility to run the Louisiana National Guard.

If you've been following this national crisis the way I have, you're cheering Governor Blanco, who arguably saved the lives of countless Louisianans by refusing. As for what, precisely, Bush was asking her to do:

Bush administration officials sent Blanco a legal memo seeking to federalize Louisiana law enforcement under the Insurrection Act, which is used to suppress civil disobedience that threatens to turn into anarchy. The act would clarify the chains of command of local, state and federal agencies with the president in charge.

Rather than cede control, Blanco on Saturday morning named James Lee Witt, who ran the Federal Emergency Management Agency under Clinton, to help run relief efforts.

That's a link to the same article as the above quote. Discussion of the request and refusal is also being reported, among other places, by the Houston Chronicle (near end of article just above the subheading 'Congress to take up aid'), the Los Angeles Times (about 5/7 of the way down the page, past the advertisements and other sidebars), the Washington Post (halfway down page one), and Glasgow (Scotland)'s The Herald.

Both 2theadvocate.com (the joint website of Baton Rouge's The Advocate newspaper and TV station WBRZ) and the Houston Chronicle also mentioned that the White House apparently failed to notify Blanco that Bush would be making another visit Monday, so that the governor had to scrap plans to meet with other leaders in Houston on Monday, including former Presidents Bush and Clinton, after hearing about the impending Bush visit late on Sunday, from a journalist. (One or more of Blanco's daughters may have gone to Houston in her place, according to the Advocate/BRZ site.)

The Los Angeles Times article more clearly linked Witt's hiring to the conflict over authority: James Lee Witt, the former Clinton administration FEMA director, ... was hired as an advisor last week by Blanco to shore up her emergency planning and to blunt federal efforts to seize authority over military relief operations (ellipsis mine).

It does not escape my notice, nor should it yours, that this important event -- the Bush government's attempt to seize control of crucial rescue and relief resources from the state of Louisiana at a time when the worst failures and outright lies have all been documented as occurring at the federal level, and the governor's brave refusal to abandon any control over her state's fate -- is being reported, when it is being reported at all, near the bottom of articles predominantly about other topics. These are articles about the progress of the evacuation process, about the beginning of the process of retrieving corpses, about people in outlying but flood-affected areas around New Orleans refusing to leave their homes (and being castigated and denied relief supplies if they don't evacuate, despite the overwhelming crisis the nation faces in coping with the hundreds of thousands of evacuees who don't have the option of remaining where they once lived, but I digress). Only the article from the UK actually presented the conflict as anything close to the topic of its headline. This should be front-page news in every major-city daily paper in America. It at LEAST deserves its own article, not to be buried in articles about other -- and unpleasant enough (corpses!) that many readers will surely skip over -- articles. This is not news that belongs in the Health and Medicine section where that L.A. Times article was.

Maybe the print papers are different. I haven't seen one in a couple of days, and I only have access to two where I am right now anyway. I *hope* things are different in the print and televised media than they appear to be from my targeted research (thank you, Google News) of online media outlets. I hope I'm wrong, and this has been getting all due coverage in the media most Americans turn to -- but I suspect I'm not.

For anything like an examination of the importance of the Bush government's request, its ramifications, even its details, I had to go outside traditional media outlets, to Jurist, the legal news & research site at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Bush administration officials sent a draft legal memorandum to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco just before midnight Friday asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, according to a source within the state's emergency operations center. Administration officials had been seeking direct unified control over local police and National Guard units that would otherwise be under the Governor's jurisdiction. According to a senior Bush official, the President has the power (by state request or unilaterally) to federalize National Guard troops and put down civil unrest under the Insurrection Act -- and here the Jurist provides links to both the text of the Insurrection Act and a PDF file of '2001 Congressional testimony on potential legal and other problems with federalizing the Guard during state emergencies'.

The entire article is accented with useful links, which I encourage readers to follow in addition to my own link to the Jurist piece. There's also a lengthy quote from the fifth (of seven) page of a Newsweek online article:

President Bush could have "federalized" the National Guard in an instant. That's what his father, President George H.W. Bush, did after the Los Angeles riots in 1992.... But after Katrina, a strange paralysis set in. For days, Bush's top advisers argued over legal niceties about who was in charge, according to three White House officials who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. Beginning early in the week, Justice Department lawyers presented arguments for federalizing the Guard, but Defense Department lawyers fretted about untrained 19-year-olds trying to enforce local laws, according to a senior law-enforcement official who requested anonymity citing the delicate nature of the discussions. (ellipsis the Jurist's)

I, for one, am relieved to hear that *someone* in George W. Bush's government is questioning ideas like this. Especially when faced with the legal truth that the federal government could take control of Lousisiana's (or Mississippi's, or Wisconsin's, or any state's) National Guard troops at any time, should they choose to use that obscure bit of law -- and with the knowledge of how troops have handled relations with New Orleans evacuees thus far.

Just for clarification: I have long been a critic of this and previous administrations, at the federal level as well as at the state level for a variety of states I have lived in or visited, and I am not by any stretch of semantics a Republican (nor have I identified myself as a Democrat for many years, though I'm more likely to vote for them than for a Republican, depending on specific candidates and specific political races) -- but I am and have always been a deeply patriotic American, and when I criticise my own country it is *because* I love it and the principles upon which it was founded, and because when the way things should be according to those principles is far off from the way things are, those discrepancies pain me.

I am not a pundit fomenting revolution. I am an observer reporting that revolution may be rising, not unlike the floodwaters that followed Katrina. Whether this rising tide can, or should, be stemmed, is a question beyond my ability to answer.

I sincerely hope that we don't get to the point where Te or I (or

tzikeh or

lcsbanana or anyone else) will be making a post along these lines entitled '...of Right ought to be Free and Independent States...' -- in fact, I'm hoping this country doesn't get anywhere near the '...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...' point. But until the need for me to do so ends, I will keep watching, and I will keep speaking out.