Intelligence Bill Slipping Away, but Foe Won’t Budge

President Bush has personally lobbied him. Families of the Sept. 11 victims have publicly blamed him. But with time running out for Congress to enact a bill this year that would put a single official in charge of the nation’s intelligence agencies, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) is standing firm in opposition.

As head of the House Judiciary Committee, Sensenbrenner is one of two powerful chairmen who defied the White House and their own GOP leadership to scuttle a compromise -- approved by a House-Senate conference committee -- during last month’s lame-duck session. With a reputation for stubbornness, he is widely expected to hang tough next week, when the 2004 Congress returns for one last try at passing the bill this year.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said that he opposes the bill because a national intelligence director, with authority over all 15 spy agencies, could disrupt the direct link between U.S. combat troops and the real-time intelligence they need in battle. Sensenbrenner’s concerns revolve around immigration and law enforcement provisions that his committee wrote into the House version of the intelligence bill.

Although Senate negotiators have denounced some of the measures as divisive, Sensenbrenner insists they are essential components of a national counter-terrorism strategy, and he has made it clear that he would rather see no bill than one that does not contain the measures he regards as core.

He is firm enough in his advocacy that on Nov. 20, when Bush called him from Chile in a last-ditch effort to win him over, Sensenbrenner reportedly agreed to drop one provision -- if the president could persuade the Senate to accept five others he had previously agreed to delete.

“Once he stakes out his territory and makes it as public as he has, I would think the chances would be slim to none that he will change his position,” said Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo.), one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for tightening immigration controls.

Sensenbrenner reached an impasse with Senate negotiators when he insisted on keeping a provision in the House bill that would ban states from issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, as 11 states do.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation that would have legalized issuing licenses to illegal immigrants, saying he feared that the bill would make it easier for terrorists to get licenses.

Sensenbrenner also is fighting to tighten border security, to make it harder for immigrants to apply for political asylum and to expedite the deportation of those who enter the United States illegally.

Those issues, Tancredo said, resonate with House conservatives who see the intelligence bill as their best bet for enacting far-reaching immigration provisions.

Despite the conservatives’ position, the administration is making a final push this week to get the bill passed.

Speaking Tuesday in Ottawa, Bush took issue with those who questioned his commitment to the bill.

“Let’s see if I can say it as plainly as I can,” Bush said in response to a reporter’s question. “I am for the intelligence bill. I have spoken with Duncan Hunter ... about the bill. I spoke with Rep. Sensenbrenner about the bill.”

Bush said Vice President Dick Cheney met Tuesday with the chairman and the vice chairman of the independent Sept. 11 commission. It was the panel’s report on intelligence failures surrounding the terrorist attacks that triggered the congressional push for an intelligence overhaul this fall.

The commission’s chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, former Indiana Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, said that they wanted to coordinate with Cheney on the best way to get the bill passed next week.

“The president has put his position, his prestige, his credibility on the line on this bill. This is the first test of that after his reelection. And I don’t think the president wants to take a defeat on this bill,” Hamilton told reporters before his meeting with Cheney.

Bush said he planned to discuss the bill with House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), and that senior White House officials planned to raise the issue during a retreat of Republican congressional leaders that began Tuesday in southern Virginia.

If the bill fails to pass next week -- the final lame-duck session is scheduled for Monday and may extend a day -- its supporters will have to reintroduce it in the next Congress, which takes office in January.

Intelligence reform advocates say they fear that the legislation will stand little chance of passage in a Congress that is likely to be distracted by Bush’s ambitious second-term agenda of domestic policy initiatives.

To win passage next week, the White House must either win over Sensenbrenner and Hunter, or persuade the Senate to accede to the demands of one of the two chairmen. Hastert has indicated he will not bring the measure to a vote over the objections of the chairmen.

Those who know Sensenbrenner say they doubt he can be persuaded to abandon his demands.

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood), who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said Sensenbrenner was a fair-minded chairman, but a man who stuck to his positions.

“Jim is a very strong advocate for what he believes in,” Berman said. “He is a smart guy. He is a tough guy. The question here is how passionate the president is about this bill, because he is the one guy who could get Jim to say: ‘All right, if you want this, Mr. President.’ ”

But one Sensenbrenner admirer said he doubted that the lawmaker could be moved.

“I think he’s at a point in his career where he doesn’t really care about that kind of pressure if he is in a position to save 100,000 lives,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a lobbying group that seeks to stop illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), coauthor of the Senate’s intelligence bill and head of its negotiating team with the House, said she found Sensenbrenner’s position unreasonable.

The Senate, Collins said, “started out having no provisions at all dealing with immigration.... We agreed to accept almost all of Chairman Sensenbrenner’s law enforcement provisions ... despite the fact that our conferees were very much opposed to dealing with far-reaching law enforcement provisions that had had no committee hearings.”

The provisions that negotiators accepted, Collins said, included adding thousands of Border Patrol agents and an increase in the number of detention beds so that illegal immigrants who were caught were not discharged back into society.

But those and other concessions, Collins said, did not satisfy Sensenbrenner.

Collins said Senate negotiators believed they had made all the concessions they could make. If the bill is to be enacted this year, she said, “I’m hopeful the president and his staff will be able to come up with solutions.”