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September 06, 2005
Hugh Hewitt asks: Why does anyone think the Federal Government can intervene?
Hugh Hewitt asks some good questions:
- What is the "police power?"
Where does it reside?
Is there a federal "police power?"
Can the federal government order the evacuation of a city when state and local officials have not done so?
Who has first call on a state's national guard?
Who controls a city's police department?
Can a federal official order a police department to deploy in strength to specific points within a city such as the Supredome or the Convention Center?
Can a federal official commandeer a city's supply of school busses, city busses, and city personnel?
For starters, the police power resides in the states. There is no general federal police power...
For the federal government to act in the face of a natural disaster, it's help must be requested and its guidance accepted by the state and local officials.
"States are accorded wide latitude in the regulation of their local economies under their police powers," the Supreme Court wrote in the 1976 case of New Orleans v. Dukes, and that wide latitude extends to every aspect of disaster planning (or non-planning.)
Every effort to blame Bush (or laughably Secretary Rice) is simply demagoguery...
One can argue that our system of government doesn't work well when local authorities are either corrupt or incompotent. Which is true. But the alternative of Federal control is, in my opinion, worse. Not to mention the fact that you would have to change the Constitution in order to give Federal control.
My father argues that what you could do is have Federal inspections of various state institutions, a Federal "guideline" for things like flood control for major urban areas, and then publish the results. What he hopes is that news papers would pick up the results and alert the citizens with headlines like: New Orleans levees fail Federal inspections for the 5th time in a row. This seems reasonable to me. Certainly a lot of people knew that New Orlean's levees weren't likely to protect the city in the face of a class 4 hurricane. And yet they did not fix the system. Well they paid the price of their complacency this time.
Posted by rakhier at September 6, 2005 09:43 AM