WASHINGTON, Sept 8: Democratic leaders pushing for an independent commission to investigate the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina spurned on Thursday a plan by majority Republicans for a joint congressional inquiry.
House of Representatives Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, called the House-Senate investigation announced by Republican leaders on Wednesday a “sham” and said it would not produce an objective assessment of what went wrong in the hours and days following the storm.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada also said he would not participate in the Republican-led inquiry.
The government’s initial response to the catastrophic storm that left hundreds of thousands homeless and thousands feared dead along the US Gulf Coast has come under intense bipartisan criticism.
While President George W. Bush declared Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama disaster areas days before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug 29 “to avert the threat of a catastrophe,” residents of the region complained there was no federal help until days after the storm.
Pelosi said on CNN on Thursday that in meetings with Bush this week to discuss the response to Katrina the president asked her “‘What didn’t go right last week?’”
House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, both Republicans, announced what they said would be a bipartisan investigation at an event on Wednesday to which no Democrats were invited. With their plan, aides said Republicans would have the majority of members.
“The partisan proposal that Republican leaders outlined yesterday is completely unacceptable,” Pelosi said. “House Democrats will not participate in a sham that is just the latest example of congressional Republicans being the foxes guarding the president’s hen house.”
Both Pelosi and Reid have called for an independent commission similar to the one that investigated intelligence failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Reid also declined to name Democrats to the panel saying its current structure would not yield the truth.
“The only way to ensure that all levels of our government are held accountable to the people is to take this process out of the hands of politicians with a vested interest in the outcome,” he said.
Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean said Republicans would move ahead with the inquiry and hoped “that in the end the Democrats will come around and join us for the good of the country.”
PANEL FORGING AHEAD: While the joint congressional inquiry appears to be getting off to a rocky start, a Senate panel began its investigation into the government response effort.
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said she is committed to pushing the inquiry forward on a bipartisan basis. She and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the panel, spoke to reporters following a closed-door committee session with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard.—Reuters