March 6, 2006
Louisiana GOP Lawmakers Fear Katrina Fallout
By Robert
Novak
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's visit to Katrina-ravaged Louisiana
Wednesday follows six months of bungling that threatens political
catastrophe for the state's Republicans. He will boost his belated
$4.2 billion plan finally to provide housing for people made homeless
by the storm, but it may be too little, too late. The government's
post-hurricane performance has been a mess, and Republicans get
the blame.
Rep. Richard
Baker, a 10-term conservative Republican congressman from Baton
Rouge with a 91 percent pro-Bush voting record, sat down with
me in his Capitol Hill office last week to talk politics frankly:
"The backlash is unknowable, but it is a big concern. When
we go from a Republican White House to a Republican Congress to
a Republican Senate to a majority of Republicans in the state
congressional delegation, we are viewed as in charge. We are being
measured by this storm response and by what Republicans do to
help poor people."
That bleak
assessment turns on its head simplistic analysis following Katrina
that predicted evacuation of Democratic-voting African-Americans
to the far corners of the nation would turn Louisiana into a deep
red Republican state. On the contrary, the performance of the
last six months may return the state to Democratic blue. Quite
apart from who was at fault for an inadequate immediate response
to the storm, Republicans are blamed for what has happened since
then.
Baker expressed
"great frustration" to me about the $27 billion in federal
funds actually spent (well below the widely mentioned $85 billion
figure). He said he "abhorred" 12 percent administrative
expenses incurred by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Of the $27 billion, nothing has been spent on housing. "We
have thousands of acres of homes just standing in ruins, and the
pace with which that cleanup is going is bitterly frustrating,"
Baker said.
In his frustration,
Baker proposed a new federal entity (the Louisiana Recovery Corp.)
to finance redevelopment of devastated areas. While Baker got
it through the House Financial Services Committee by a 50 to 9
vote, the White House killed it on grounds it would impede local
initiative. Prominent Louisianans then were ready to write off
the Bush administration as hopeless. The first sign of flexibility
was flashed Feb. 14 when the $4.2 billion package was unveiled.
Will it
save Republicans from the consequences of six months of inaction
and incompetence? The reported minimum cost of the notorious trailers
as temporary housing is $60,000 per unit, enough to build permanent
modular housing. "We would have been better off," Baker
told me, "if we'd had a contract with Wal-Mart, where you
could have gone in and bought 100,000 emergency response packages,
with bottled water and Pop-Tarts."
The latest
governmental outrage concerns the pending $4.2 billion in Katrina
supplemental appropriations, which includes a "hazard mitigation"
program. A homeowner with a damaged residence from Katrina would
be offered a generous cash payment, with the stipulation that
no replacement home -- or any other structure -- could be built
on this supposedly flood-vulnerable land. When an outraged Baker
asked the administration's view of this anti-development caveat,
he said he received this answer: "Well, we think this would
make the appropriation a little more palatable to members of Congress."
In an opaque
administration, it is not clear who makes such decisions. It is
presumed nothing is decided in the White House without the knowledge
of senior presidential adviser Karl Rove, but he has handed off
all congressional distress calls to National Economic Council
Director Al Hubbard. The complaining lawmakers have not received
much satisfaction from Hubbard, but he was vigorously involved
in drafting the new housing plan.
In the eyes
of distressed Louisianans, nobody seems to be making decisions.
That's bad news for Richard Baker. Anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000
flood evacuees have moved into Baker's Baton Rouge district, where
his largest margin of victory in contested races has been 6,000
votes. "If I'm viewed as part of the problem by those people
who have lost everything," he said, "the political consequences
of that are pretty clear." The question is whether that will
be clear to George W. Bush when he arrives in New Orleans Wednesday.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
