Exploiting Katrina - New York Times

October 3, 2005
Exploiting Katrina

It was almost inevitable that we would see every kind of legislative lunacy after Katrina, proposed in the name of accelerating the cleanup in New Orleans, improving the nation's energy security or achieving other worthy objectives. And so we have: Congress has used Katrina as cover for ideas that could never stand on their own and for a remarkably brazen raid on the public treasury and environmental protections.

Take, for example, Richard Pombo, the chairman of the House Resources Committee, who is proposing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, allow states to opt out of a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling, and suspend judicial and administrative reviews of federal decisions to open public lands for oil and gas leasing. This is the same Richard Pombo who proposed last week - joking, he said - to sell off a few lesser-known national parks if money from the Arctic refuge was not forthcoming.

Then there is Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who, ostensibly to increase fuel supplies, rammed a bill through the House energy committee that would ease clean air restrictions on refineries and drive a final nail in the coffin of New Source Review, a useful law the administration has been trying to kill for years. The law requires older industrial facilities to install modern pollution controls, and Mr. Barton's bill would remove not only refineries but hundreds of coal-fired power plants from its reach.

Similar mischief is afoot in the Senate, where James Inhofe, the ferociously anti-regulatory Oklahoma Republican who runs the environment committee, would suspend for up to 18 months any environmental law that in his view stands in the way of post-hurricane reconstruction.

The most egregious example of self-dealing comes from the Louisiana delegation. Not content with the $62.3 billion Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief, the state's representatives have asked for $250 billion more in federal reconstruction funds, equal to more than $50,000 per Louisiana resident.

This seems a bit much, especially since the proposal also calls for suspending important environmental reviews and funneling huge sums to the Army Corps of Engineers for projects that seem to have more to do with the delegation's political ambitions than with flood control and the intelligent restoration of the Louisiana Delta.

Congress's first obligation is to help Louisiana's stricken residents get back on their feet. It is also obliged to design and deliver a reconstruction plan that makes sense now and for the future. To exploit this disaster for short-term political and ideological gain is cynical even by Congressional standards.


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