Congress Watch: To-do becomes must-do
The to-do list awaiting Congress's return to Washington this week had been formidable even before Hurricane Katrina goose-stepped all over the Mississippi Gulf Coast and turned New Orleans into an underwater morgue for still uncounted hundreds of people.
But in the space of a few hours, the rampaging storm turned formidable into critical and to-do into absolutely must-do. After racing back to Washington a few days early to approve $10.5 billion as an initial response the hurricane tragedy, Congress now faces the prospect of dealing with months and months of fallout from the Katrina tragedy, first in getting help to people who critically need it, then in figuring out what went wrong and who's to blame.
"These are questions that Congress should legitimately ask," says House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. Then come the longer-term questions about if and how to rebuild the devastated areas and who will pay for it.
The result is that a lot of previously urgent matters before the Congress will likely vanish from the roster. This week the planned consideration of a repeal of the estate tax is off the table. Social Security and Medicare overhaul will wait. Both House and Senate leaders have announced plans to hold hearings on the widely criticized early federal response to the hurricane.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who has seen an influx of refugees in his suburban Houston district, suggests that it might be awhile before Congress and the country can get this storm behind them.
"The full impact of this crisis on our entire nation, our economy, our society, will not be known for years," says DeLay. "Our only choice now, our only hope, is to come together with courage, compassion, and resolve to do whatever it takes to get through this emergency . . . The floodwaters will recede, but America's compassion and duty to the victims of this tragedy will not."
But says Pelosi: "We have to ask ourselves in any after-action review of something that's happened, how could things have been different in terms of ending the emergency relief part of it and moving on to recovery? What could have been done to prevent the magnitude of this tragedy?"
Pelosi, trying early on to avoid the acrimony that will surely come later, was not willing to characterize the administration response as a failure of leadership but added: "I will say this—that any objective observation of what has happened in the first four or five days in the Gulf States would say that this is not a success; that we can do better as a country."
Congress Watch analyzes the issues of the day on Capitol Hill and profiles members of the Senate and House.