254 The making of American domestic policy
the President the legislative authority to create military commissions of
the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the President from returning to
Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary.Within days the Bush Administration accepted the Court’s opinion that
members of al-Qaeda are protected by the Geneva Convention. However, this
did not mean that the prisoners would be released, and the Administration
immediately began to urge Congress to pass legislation that would narrowly
define the rights granted to detainees under the Convention. The debate on
this issue promised to be protracted, but the setback to the arbitrary exercise
of power by the president was clear.
Hurricane Katrina
On Monday 29 August 2005 a Category 3 hurricane struck the coast of Loui-
siana. The city of New Orleans was in its path and because much of the city
is below sea level, protected by ‘levees’, banks of earth and stone, when the
levees were breached flood waters poured into the city. Hurricane Katrina
caused 1,326 deaths, nearly all in Louisiana. More than 700,000 people were
displaced and an estimated 300,000 homes were destroyed or damaged in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. New Orleans lost its electricity supply,
communications failed, roads and bridges were destroyed and law and order
broke down. The disaster affected over 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast
area. The effects of Hurricane Katrina are important, not just because of
what happened to the people of the Gulf Coast, but because they illustrate
important political and governmental problems that arise from the system
of federalism, the divided responsibilities of the federal, state and local au-
thorities and the inherent difficulties of coordinating them. In a country as
rich and powerful as the United States, for a number of reasons, the political
system failed to cope with a situation, certainly extremely difficult, but one
which clearly should have been handled more competently than it was.
Hurricanes are not new to the Gulf Coast. Every year during the season
hurricanes come up from the Caribbean, and sophisticated tracking systems
have been evolved to give as much warning as possible to the threatened
population and to the emergency services. Over many years over one hun-
dred federal government agencies had been established to deal with various
aspects of natural emergencies and state and local authorities created their
own organisations. The development of nuclear power added further con-
cerns about the need to cope with disaster situations. However, in the 1960s
and 1970s a series of strong hurricanes and two earthquakes led President
Carter in 1979 to bring these federal agencies together by creating an inde-
pendent agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 brought new responsibilities to the
Agency to prepare for, and respond to, disastrous events. In 2003 FEMA was