Two stories worth bringing to your attention which compliment each other. First up is the news that Sen. Pat Roberts is once again trying to push the Phase 2 Iraqi intelligence investigation past the elections :

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel’s inquiry into the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time.

The inquiry has dragged on for more than two years, a slow pace that prompted Democrats to force the Senate into an extraordinary closed-door session in November. Republicans then promised to speed up the probe.

If there was nothing to hide, why all the delay tactics? Hmmm…but before I get off on a tangent, keep this unfortunately typical example of Republican subservience to the Executive branch in mind when you read this :

Hurricane Katrina turned FEMA into a “symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy” so far beyond repair that it should be scrapped, senators said Thursday. They called for creation of a new disaster relief agency as the next storm season looms on the horizon.

The push to replace the beleaguered agency was the top recommendation of a hefty Senate inquiry that concluded that top officials from New Orleans to Washington failed to adequately prepare for and respond to the deadly storm, despite weather forecasts predicting its path through the Gulf Coast.

“The first obligation of government is to protect our people,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigation. “In Katrina, we failed at all levels of government to meet that fundamental obligation.”

Think about that for a moment. A GOP-led Senate so timid that they’ve all but ignored some of the biggest political scandals to come along in our lifetimes has come to the conclusion that the Bush Administration has screwed up FEMA so badly that the best thing to do is to completely abolish the agency and start over from scratch. Damn.

Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised there were ulterior motives at play here. There’s the GOP trend of distancing themselves from our lame duck President, but I think another motivation would be the prospect of getting to redesign FEMA. Considering how well they’ve done rebuilding New Orleans, I think Democrats should start invoking the reverse-Pottery Barn rule : You broke it, but you don’t get to “fix” it.