It's been one year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Nearly 3,000 Americans are estimated to have died in the aftermath of the storm; the lack of a hard number of deaths, the apparent sluggishness in mounting an emergency response, and widespread lack of power many months after the storm's passing have all been worthy of hard investigation.
The House and Senate, however, have done next to nothing. There have been zero substantive reports on the aftermath of the storm or on government preparedness or response. Compared to the congressional response to any other national disaster—or to, say, the deaths of Americans in Benghazi!—the reaction has been not just muted, but silent.
A Politico report compares the response to Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, and Hurricane Maria last year. The Katrina inquiries were riddled with partisanship and accusations of whitewashing, but hundreds of pages of reports were released nonetheless; after a year, the current House and Senate have no similar results to show. It's not even close.
[T]he Senate has barely investigated the storms at all. [Oversight Committee chair Sen. Ron Johnson], for instance, hasn’t sent a single letter to FEMA requesting documents or further information about the administration’s response to the storm, according to the committee’s website. [...]
“A lot of times, there’s a lot of lessons learned that can come out of those hearings,” said Michael Coen, who was chief of staff at FEMA during the Obama administration. “They aren’t going to find anything if they didn’t look.”
Part of the problem is that Puerto Rico has no House or Senate vote, thus allowing lawmakers to dismiss the crisis with little electoral consequences. Part of it may be a new supreme Republican reluctance to criticize the actions of the executive branch or its resident blustering moron. Part of it may be racism. It may even be evidence of something larger and newer, a new dismissal of the very concept of competent government by the powers-that-be.
Whatever the case, Democrats have been pushing for an independent commission to investigate the Hurricane Maria response. Republicans have refused.
It's not likely to happen unless the current crop of Republican lawmakers gets routed in the November midterms and either the House or Senate falls into Democratic hands. If that doesn't happen, the current silence on Maria may well end up being a permanent one.
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