Posted on 09/26/2005 4:05:53 PM PDT by tjbravo
In his televised address on September 15, President Bush declared that "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces--the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice." Senator John Warner (R-Va.), chair of the Armed Services Committee, goes further. In the wake of Katrina, he's suggested weakening Posse Comitatus, the longstanding federal law that restricts the government's ability to use the U.S. military as a police force. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita called Posse Comitatus a "very archaic" law that hampers the president's ability to respond to a crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at cato.org ...
Police state in the making. In the world of bad mistakes ... this would set a record
Disagree.
Gotta run - will post more later.
Now refresh my memory. Isn't there some sort of document that enumerates the powers granted to government by the people? And If I'm not mistaken, doesn't that document leave this sort of thing in the hands of the individual states? What was that thing called, again?
I'm sure glad we didn't elect a totalitarian statist in the last election.
GEORGE W. BUSH THE WHITE HOUSE, March 27, 2002.
Here we go again.
The first step down that VERY slippery slope....
It never f**kin' ends.
Yes, but one travesty should not beget another. They should rethink this.
It's not a police state in the making. It's just vast incompetency in the making.
This whole thing was because of the failure of a mayor (Nagin) and a governor (Blanco) to perform their duties. There should probably be some point - fairly close in - where a non-performing local authority should be superseded - and later there should also be something like federal charges for irresponsible local authorities who did not perform their duties at a crucial time.
All we need to do is tighten up local response, at least to some extent by penalizing failure, and prepare backup mechanisms. We don't need immediate federalization of anything, because it simply won't be efficient.
I agree. Texas proves that you don't need to militarize the situation. Gaurd troops under governors control and assets loaned to the guard or requersted by the state are sufficient.
Just be cause a corrupt state government in LA was screwed up does not mean we need to screw up the rest of the country.
The only thing texas could have done better was to open the other lanes of the freeway sooner (20 hours sooner), and federalizing the situation would not have helped that.
Well, if you assumed that all state and local govs were as incompetent as what we saw in Louisiana, then yes, it was "clear" that something had to be done.
Thanks to Texas, it is no longer clear - the MSM was desperately hoping we'd fail in our mission to get everyone out. We didn't, and thanks to their wishful thinking and continuous coverage, we've just shown the world that incompetence isn't a defining characteristic of all state and local governments.
We accomplished the impossible in 72 hours with little to no Federal help. The onus is back on Louisiana to explain themselves. A quick glance at TXCN shows that Louisiana is dropping the ball again - they're apparently keeping aid out of some parish "to get people to leave".
The idea of weakening posse commitatus may just end up getting tossed onto the "bad idea" pile.
Not just NO, but HELL NO!!!
From what I'm reading, opening the freeway to contraflow much earlier would have made it *harder*, not easier to get people out. The buses running people out early were coming back on the other side, prepositioned supplies were using the other side, the fuel tanker trucks were using the other side.
The only thing I saw that went wrong was that too many people bailed earlier than the plan had allowed for, and Texas didn't have time to get resupply to all the gas stations in the area ahead of the wave of evacuees. There was a backup plan in that case, and it worked well - send tanker trucks out as they became available to resupply vehicles on the road and send out buses to distribute water and pick up the stranded.
Nobody got left behind who wanted to go. Not one soul was left stranded on a freeway.
Sounds like a vast left wing incompetency.
But consider carefully how this power could be misused in the hands of misguided, incompetent, or partisan federal authorities.
It is a states decision, period. If any state does not ask for the federal help, that state can go it alone as it wishes.
The one and only reason the fed could conceivably have to interfere would be in the name of saving the Union, as Lincoln did.
There all better
I watched for hours on end, including surfing to TDot's hiway camera site, and there was virtually NIL traffic southbound. That dog won't hunt. All of that inflow could have been handled by secondary roads and higways.
Saying no one was stranded on the freeway as evidenced by the fact that they eventually got off flys in the face of credulity. Thousands of cars were stranded, out of gas, pulled over and pushed off the road, and traffic speed was down to 5mph for over a hundred miles. It took 20 hours to get this situation cleaned up. The governor said as much on national tv both saturday and sunday. But then what does he know.
Further a significant number of people simply pulled off and went back home.
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