ibenez wrote:
Worrying about the legal implications in a disaster is pretty sad.
FEMA should have requested military assistance and noone should have been worrying abuot legal issues.

Well, for the part of the country that isn't coping directly, which is most of us, there's nothing wrong with addressing issues that ought to be addressed. If my mom dies, i still have to pay my bills and go to work. However, I agree with you in the sense that getting extra personnel on the ground (or water, alas) immediately should have been easier. I think we do need to be careful about how any such provision for use of active federal military in an emergency is written however. If you aren't careful, you end up permitting the federal government to step in and quell political demonstrations if they turn into an "emergency" and open up a lot of potential for misuse of federal power. We don't like that here in America, or anyway, we used to not like it.

I guess what Bush is doing is right then, cause if people are worrying about legal issues - then we just neeed to make using the military legal and those issues go away eh?

In the sense that law is a reflection of society's morality, perhaps that's so. It may be that the people want the federal government to have broader powers to respond to emergency situations. I may even agree, with the above caveat that we need to be real careful about how any such law is structured.

That all being said, I'm interested to know what caused the delay in the first place... was it congress or the oval office? Who was waiting? The truth is, it's a compelling argument for expansion of federal power, which sets off my normally quiescent libertarianism alarm. That ultra paranoid voice wonders if the administration might have seen an opportunity here to a) discredit the processes in place for limiting executive power and b) open the door for discussions of expanding the emergency powers available to the president. I hate to be so cynical, but politics has made me that way, at least in part.

RE: [Politech] How the Bush administration is eroding Posse Comitatus