Our View: Dangerous meddling

When National Guard troops from Washington were the first to respond to Hurricane Katrina, it didn’t happen because the federal government dispatched them. It happened because Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire phoned Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco to say, “Do you need us? We’re on the way.”

Moreover, Washington units gave transportation-strapped Oregon units a lift to the Gulf Coast.

That cooperation happens among states when emergencies strike. It doesn’t take the White House to order it. If extra manpower is needed when forest fire season arrives, Gregoire says, she knows help is as close as Oregon or Idaho. That’s the way it works.

But if Hurricane Katrina had struck in November 1999 instead of 2005, the governor of Washington might not have been able to respond to Louisiana’s need, at least not as readily. Some of the state’s National Guard troops had their hands full helping local authorities restore order to the streets of Seattle where rioting broke out over the World Trade Organization meeting there.

That ability of state officials to prioritize the use of their resources is important to the state and ought to be preserved. Unfortunately, Congress threatened it last year by empowering the president to federalize state National Guard units when needed for domestic events.

The 2006 amendment to the federal Insurrection Act gave the president authority to take control of National Guards in response to any “natural disaster, epidemic or other serious public emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States.”

As Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, adjutant general of the Washington National Guard, told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, that broadly stated authority “has very negative and destructive implications for the state, local and federal unity of effort” that is needed when disasters and other domestic emergencies occur.

Lowenberg was testifying in favor of S.513, a measure to repeal the 2006 legislation, which was enacted abruptly, for unexplained reasons and without consulting state officials.

The system previously in place had succeeded for more than a century in allowing state, federal and local authorities to respond effectively to emergencies. Advocates of last year’s legislation didn’t say why they were changing it.

Lowenberg and other witnesses stressed at Tuesday’s hearing, however, that it will disrupt a state’s ability to use its own resources to deal with issues at home.

The National Guard leader didn’t mince words: “It openly invites disharmony, confusion and the fracturing of what should be a united effort at the very time when states and territories need federal assistance – not a federal takeover – in responding to state and local emergencies.”

Congress committed a tactical error last year. It should retrench.