Katrina Inquiry Fractures Into Three Probes

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia thought he was offering lawmakers political catnip when he called former FEMA director Michael D. Brown to testify before his committee last month.

The Republican chairman of a special House panel investigating the government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina figured the chance to publicly question Brown would prove irresistible to Democrats who refused to serve on his panel, calling his probe a whitewash of the federal government’s handling of the disaster.

The partisan chasm that has widened since Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast proved more powerful than the lure of confronting the bureaucrat blamed by many for much of what went wrong with the government’s response.

House Democrats maintained their boycott and continued to criticize the investigation as a Republican effort to minimize the federal government’s slow reaction. Davis also failed to persuade his Senate counterpart, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, to attend.

Nor does he expect Democrats to relent next week and join his panel’s questioning of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The controversy surrounding the committee illustrates how far Congress has strayed from a bipartisan, joint House-Senate inquiry that Republican congressional leaders announced last month into the actions of local, state and federal officials after Hurricane Katrina.

Instead, three separate, overlapping investigations are underway -- the one in the House, one in the Senate and one by the White House.

They are expected to produce three reports about missteps made by government officials -- and offer three sets of recommendations for fixing what went wrong.

And that, said Richard A. Falkenrath, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington, is bad news for the nation.

“The thing that we might lose is an opportunity to get on a better trajectory in terms of preparing this country for catastrophic disasters,” said Falkenrath, who served in the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Department.

Other congressional observers and outside experts caution that none of the findings may be considered definitive, and could be contradictory.

“We felt strongly and still feel strongly that there should be an independent commission to investigate the poor cooperation and response to Katrina,” said Susannah Goodman, senior legislative advocate for the watchdog group Common Cause.

“I think the process is very politicized, and that is extremely unfortunate.”

Goodman added: “At the end of the day, what everybody wants is a set of recommendations that will fix the problems, that will tell us how we can be better prepared for the next disaster.”

House and Senate members have cooperated before in conducting major inquiries, most recently following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

After public pressure, however, an independent commission also was set up to investigate the attacks.

Democrats pushed for a similar independent panel for the Katrina probe.

But the White House and GOP congressional leaders balked at this idea. And in an example of Washington’s current political climate, neither side would blink.

In addition to the probe Davis is running, Collins and the ranking Democrat on her committee, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, are conducting the Senate investigation. Frances Townsend, President Bush’s domestic security advisor, is spearheading the White House inquiry.

Each probe is churning out its own requests for documents from the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA and other government agencies. House and Senate committees are conducting their own hearings and will sometimes question the same witnesses.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said Democrats had no faith that the Davis-led panel would mount an aggressive inquiry into the Bush administration’s role in the response to the hurricane, because Republicans refused to give Democrats equal representation on the committee.

“The Republicans in the House refused to make this a bipartisan committee,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who, as the ranking Democrat on Davis’ Government Reform Committee, could have played a key role in the inquiry. “With Republicans running the show, I don’t think to this point the investigation has a lot of credibility.”

A handful of Democratic lawmakers from the Gulf Coast has sat in informally during the committee’s hearings. Republicans have criticized the House Democratic leadership for refusing to officially name members to the panel.

“The American people want to see Congress work together,” said Ron Bonjean, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). “When the Democrats choose not to join a committee that has been set up based on democratic majority traditions, it is disappointing and bothersome. They are only hurting themselves.”

Although they are only weeks into their investigations, sharp differences are emerging between the House and Senate investigations.

In the House, where the GOP majority wields enormous power, the investigative staff is entirely Republican.

The House panel decided to call Brown even before it had laid the documentary groundwork for questioning him, said one Republican staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, “because the Democrats should feel some political pain for boycotting, and staying away from the Brown hearing was painful for them.”

By contrast, in the Senate, Collins and Lieberman have directed their staffs to work together, said Michael Bopp, the committee’s chief of staff.

“We sent out all of our document requests jointly,” Bopp said. “We drafted the document requests together. We split up the responsibility and it is like we are one staff.”

Collins and Lieberman forged a close working relationship during their efforts last year to overhaul the intelligence community, and their staffs learned to trust each other, Bopp said.

One early joint decision was to not make the scope of their Katrina investigation public, in an effort to avoid political pressure to broaden or narrow it, said a senior GOP committee aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s political sensitivity.

Davis’ committee is making its own requests for documents.

“We were hoping to avoid duplication, but obviously that is not happening,” said Robert Stevenson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

Davis’ committee is supposed to reach its conclusions in February; neither the Collins committee nor the White inquiry has set a deadline.

Some observers predicted that the Senate probe is likely to have greater credibility than the House investigation.

“Given the fact that there has been so much controversy on the House side and so much accord on the Senate side, you will have a legitimacy gap” between the two inquiries, said Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker, an expert on relations between the House and Senate.

“If they do come to different conclusions, I would imagine that the tendency would be to label the House investigation a whitewash of the administration, because the Democrats are not really active participants in it.”