AP says thusly.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans on Wednesday scuttled an attempt by Sen. Hillary Clinton to establish an independent, bipartisan panel patterned after the 9/11 Commission to investigate what went wrong with federal, state and local governments’ response to Hurricane Katrina.

The New York Democrat’s bid to establish the panel — which would have also made recommendations on how to improve the government’s disaster response apparatus — failed to win the two-thirds majority needed to overcome procedural hurdles. Clinton got only 44 votes, all from Democrats and independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont. Fifty-four Republicans all voted no….In a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll taken Sept. 8-11, 70 percent of those surveyed supported an independent panel to investigate the government’s response to Katrina.

What’s amazing is that there’s plenty of blame to go around. Certainly the mayor and the governor made errors. Democrat leadership were the politicians who urged a reluctant president to form Homeland Security and move FEMA under its control. An independant investigation would make both sides look pretty bad – and should.

But apparently, Republicans believe it would make them look worse. The thing is, though, stonewalling will make them look even worse. Not running an independant investigation is something that the Democrat party could run television ads on, especially since just 10 years ago we had an independant prosecutor investigating a workplace affair on 400 million of the taxpayer dimes. The next 13 months till election day 2006 have the potential to get really strange, really fast.