FEMA and Hurricane Sandy

It’s truly amazing what the East Coast communities are dealing with! It looks like FEMA is doing so much better than it did after Katrina. Not only is FEMA currently dealing with a much larger geographic area but with a much greater number of affected people.

My one and hopefully only experience with FEMA was only positive. The Northridge earthquake on January 17, 1994 marked the event that connected me to FEMA. Although our house seemed intact, the walls throughout the house were cracked or were missing hunks of plaster. We were without power and heat for only three days.

But when the rains started, we had to put pots and bowls around the house to collect the rain water. At that point, not certain that our house was really safe, we contacted FEMA. A FEMA inspector came out right away and gave us a green tag. We continued to experience good-sized aftershocks for months. Thus FEMA’s inspection of our house and the inspector’s assessment that our house was safe was very comforting.

With this latest disaster, I began to think about FEMA and wondered when it was started.  It must have been established sometime after I became an adult as I had not heard of FEMA when I studied civics in high school and American government in college.  FEMA has a website that includes a brief history.

As I thought, FEMA was established after I reached adulthood. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter merged several disaster related federal governmental entities into the Federal Emergency Management Agency by Executive Order 12127. Prior to FEMA, various aspects of disaster preparedness and relief were handled by several departments that included the General Services Administration (GSA), Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Defense Department. By the time President Carter established FEMA over 100 federal agencies had been involved in some part or another with hazards, emergencies or disasters.

It’s a bit ironic that a Democrat president was the one who consolidated all of these functions into a single agency in order to make emergency management by the federal government more efficient and more effective. For as long as I can remember, I had heard that Democrats equal big government; Republicans equal small government.

It seems to me that over the last several years Republicans holding federal office also want big government. The differences seem to be more about what areas should be larger. As I listen to many of the Republicans who hold office, I am reminded of “Big Brother” from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. And it alarms me. These people certainly don’t represent the Republican Party that I remember.

I never believed that Democrats want big government while Republicans want small government. Instead, I believe most people want the right-sized and an efficient federal government. I hope we can return to a time when regardless of which party an office holder is a member that he/she is willing to work with and compromise to create a win-win situation for all the nation’s people.

Thomas Brackett Reed, Speaker of the House of Representatives

My husband had been listening to a program that talked about a very powerful Speaker of the House that almost no one knew, Thomas Brackett Reed. Mr. Reed was the Speaker of the House from 1889 to 1891 and then again from 1895 to 1899. He was a Republican.

As my husband was reading me information about Mr. Reed, I realized that Thomas Reed was politically active when a distant cousin of mine switched political parties. Henry Moore Teller was one of the two Senators elected when in 1876 Colorado achieved statehood. Henry Teller became the leader of the Silver Republican Party. But switched parties in 1896 when the Republicans would not support a bi-metal currency standard.

Being a history junkie, I wanted to learn more about Mr. Reed as he was also politically active during the time that another cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was actively involved in politics. Thomas Reed was facing many of the stalling tactics that I witnessed over the years by the political party not in the majority at any given time.

The Democrat House members who were in the minority at the time were able to make the House of Representatives ineffectual by using loop holes in the rules of the House. Thomas Reed stood up against the the errant Democrats and created rules of procedure that became known as the Reed's Rules.

What really surpised me was the Democratic Party viewed themselves as against big government. Speaker Reed was able to give the Speaker of the House far greater powers than any of his predecessors held. Later he rued the fact that he had contributed to the expanse of government control.

When I was in high school, I thought that the message that the Republican Party promoted was small government. Something seems to have changed with the Republican Party. The party is looking much like it did a little over 100 years ago.

It is sad to see the fragmentation of the Republican Party. But this may be meant to be another chapter in the evolution of the Whigs, Republicans, et. al.