Federalism and Katrina

The Washington Post has started to ask the same questions as Fox News and ABC did earlier this week in an analysis of the response to Hurricane Katrina. Robert Pierre reports in a piece titled in part, "Assessing Leadership", that Mayor Ray Nagin now faces many questions about his role in the fumbled disaster response -- and that his own underlings say that the answers will expose him as an incompetent:

...those in charge of the first responders -- the city and state governments -- failed to follow their own published plans for the emergency, and then failed to cooperate with the federal government when they did arrive. They essentially froze like deer in the headlights when they should have opened up the plans they drew up themselves and started running them like a playbook. The federal relief, which coordinates with state and local officials based on the emergency planning done earlier, planned their response on the expectation that those tasks would have been handled prior to the storm hitting the city. Instead, what they saw was a city mayor who had done nothing but order an evacuation too late to be effective, fail to expedite it with resources specifically named in the plan, and then run around getting hysterical for the press. Pierre also neglects to mention that the feds cannot simply take over a city or a state without the governor's permission under current law unless they are in a state of rebellion.