BP Isn't Obama's Crisis, Katrina Shouldn't Have Been Bush's

With no easy solution to the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in sight, commentary from left, right and center is coalescing around the false notion that BP's disaster is to President Obama what Hurricane Katrina was to President Bush. The limiting nature of the Constitution when it comes to federal action has not surprisingly merited little to no mention. 

A front page headline in USA Today recently asked "Is [the] oil spill becoming Obama's Katrina?", presumed constitutional originalist Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal of Obama's "original sin" having to do with the fact that "the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency", while a New York Times editorial not surprisingly lauded the president for confronting the spill and for doing "whatever else is required to prevent similar catastrophes in the future."

As for the president himself, though he has long cast himself as a constitutional scholar, it's increasingly apparent that he worships more at the altar of media notoriety than he does constitutional limits given his grandstanding comments about his administration's ability to fix BP's mistake. And ever the politician, he's taken to using daughter Malia as a prop behind his efforts to solve a problem that logic tells us he and the government he oversees are very unequal to.

Back to the much forgotten Constitution, it doesn't require legal training to know that its creation was meant first to authorize the federal government, and then to severely limit its powers. If there's any doubt about this, one need only read the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which states very clearly that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

To put it simply, the Constitution is a restraining document, and it's important to note that nowhere in the Constitution is the government empowered to oversee oil spills. The limits are there with good reason.

Indeed, one doesn't have to be a small-government libertarian to understand that our federal minders don't possess the competence to deal with oil spills anymore than they have the foresight to rein in faulty banking practices. The founders didn't so much despise government as they were properly skeptical about a centralized bureaucracy's ability to handle specialized situations.

These constitutional constraints held for the most part until the great Mississippi River flood of 1927. According to historian John Barry, who wrote the 1997 book Rising Tide, there was at the time "a fault line in American thought about the role of government and how much responsibility it had for its citizens."

In 1887 President Grover Cleveland vetoed a $10,000 appropriation for drought victims in Texas based on his contention that the federal government had no "warrant in the Constitution ... to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds." In 1907 the federal government demanded that banks in New Orleans put up $250,000 before the surgeon general would help fight the yellow fever epidemic there.

Despite the fact that the 1927 flood burdened the Red Cross with nearly 700,000 refugees to feed, there was great reluctance on the part of Southern leaders to initiate federal action. When President Calvin Coolidge refused to call Congress into session to respond, they backed him.

The consensus during that era was that government should do nothing to fix localized crises. A New York Times editorial said it was fortunate "there are still some things that can be done without the wisdom of Congress and the all-fathering Federal Government."

Still, the federal government did involve itself in the disaster of '27, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover's unprecedented relief efforts arguably won him the White House the next year. And with slopes nothing if not slippery, by 1928 Congress passed a flood-control bill for the Mississippi River that was "the greatest expenditure the government has undertaken except in the World War." The Mississippi River flood was now a national issue.

Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, what was a local disaster quickly became President Bush's problem.  The notion of "moral hazard" is increasingly applied to anything and everything, but it could surely be applied to the events in Louisiana of nearly five years ago.

With Americans more and more reliant on federal aid for unfortunate occurrences large and small, President Bush was charged with solving Katrina, and Katrina sadly furthered the notion that the federal government should have a muscular role in all calamities. Constitutional limits were once again trampled on, and worse, it excused faulty voting on the part New Orleanians not forced to consider hapless Mayor Ray Nagin's capacity to deal with local problems.

Not asked enough back in 2005 was how and where New Orleans would have grown had the federal government not acted in 1927, not to mention how much more contemplative its citizens would have been in the voting booth had it been properly known that an eventual flood (residents there had been predicting Katrina for quite some time) would have been their headache to deal with. Just the same, it must be asked now what kind of local rules and regulations concerning oil drilling would have been put in place had it been known that any mistake would solely impact the citizens of Louisiana and its political establishment.

Instead, President Obama is doing what all politicians do by virtue of his attempt to federalize what shouldn't be. The result is a Constitution that is made increasingly irrelevant to all of our detriment.

The greater truth is that President Obama shouldn't be on the hook for a fix of the BP disaster anymore than President Bush should have been charged with saving New Orleans back in 2005. But until voters do their constitutional duty whereby they limit executive and federal powers, responses to disasters, both natural and commercial, will be expensive, incompetent and unconstitutional.