House Passes Bill to Overhaul Intelligence

The House on Tuesday night passed the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s intelligence community since the Cold War, with the Senate set to approve an identical bill today. President Bush is expected to sign the measure into law by the end of the week.

Just last month, the legislation seemed in danger when powerful committee chairmen opposed it in defiance of Bush and the House Republican leadership.

But the bill passed 336 to 75 after intensive lobbying by Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials. Most of the no votes were cast by Republicans, many of whom objected to the stripping out of tough immigration provisions.

The final legislation represented a significant compromise between House and Senate negotiators. It granted a new national intelligence director less authority over the nation’s 15 spy agencies than the Senate’s original bill and the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission had called for, but more than the House legislation would have allowed.

Key to the agreement were changes in language to assure Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, that the director could not interfere with military commanders’ ability to get intelligence they considered necessary for troops in the field.

Still, reform proponents said, the legislation gives the director the power to start restructuring an intelligence community that evolved to confront the former Soviet Union but is now charged with battling stateless global terrorists.

It remained unclear Tuesday exactly how much power the new director would have, especially over intelligence functions that are currently controlled by the Pentagon.

To win support from House conservatives, the White House and GOP leadership also promised that they would attach immigration provisions that were dropped from the intelligence bill to the first legislation in the next Congress that seemed certain to be signed into law.

The compromise saved Bush the embarrassment of having members of his own party reject a bill he had urged them to pass. It also gave the president an important political victory as he prepares to launch his ambitious second-term agenda.

The White House said that Bush, who watched the televised House debate while traveling on Air Force One, was “very pleased” with the outcome. “He knows this bill will make America safer,” the statement said.

But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said she found the immigration commitment disturbing. “I have serious concerns,” Pelosi said, that the promise means the House leadership will bring back measures “that many of us considered egregious.”

Such a promise, Pelosi said during a floor speech expressing support for the bill, would tarnish the Republicans’ achievement.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the ad hoc committee that negotiated the bill, said he believed it was the product of “what may go down in the annals of this institution as one of the most difficult, certainly one of the most involved, conferences ever.” The negotiations, he said, “have been tough, hard and sometimes extremely contentious.”

Reform proponents met with fierce opposition from the Pentagon and its supporters during the months in which the proposal made its way through the legislative process in each chamber. At several points, the intelligence overhaul was pronounced all but dead.

Still, experts cautioned Tuesday, the obstacles a national intelligence director is likely to face in overseeing many disparate spy agencies will make the drawn-out legislative battle look easy.

Lead House and Senate negotiators insisted that the final version of the bill preserves the core recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, created by Congress to investigate events surrounding the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The commission said a strong national intelligence director was needed to force the nation’s spy agencies to share information and “connect the dots” among data flooding various agencies.

At a news conference Tuesday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the final language of the bill would in no way weaken the authority of the director of national intelligence. Collins, who coauthored the Senate’s intelligence bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), said the revised language provides only a “little extra comfort” to those worried about the chain-of-command issue.

“This legislation is going to make a real difference to the security of our country,” Collins said. “We would not be where we are today but for the support of the president. The president and the vice president’s interventions with House members were absolutely key in moving this bill forward.”

Lieberman said the bill was important to “honor the memory of the 3,000 Americans” who were killed Sept. 11.

Just last month, the bill seemed doomed when Hunter and House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) joined forces to block House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) from bringing it to the floor on the last day of a pre-Thanksgiving lame-duck session.

Hunter said that language in the original legislation raised doubts about whether the intelligence chief’s authority would keep military commanders from getting necessary information to forces on the battlefield.

And Sensenbrenner objected to the Senate removing a provision from the bill that would have banned states from issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants as well as other language that would have made it harder for foreigners to qualify for asylum.

The White House stepped in, negotiating a compromise that satisfied Hunter’s concerns.

At a conference meeting Tuesday morning, a majority of House Republicans agreed to support the bill if Hastert brought it to a vote, even though Sensenbrenner and some other conservatives continued to oppose it.

Sensenbrenner repeated his opposition to the bill on the floor -- and was backed by a parade of Republican members.

In addition to creating a national intelligence director, the final bill would codify the national counterterrorism center that was created in August by presidential order. The center is meant to coordinate intelligence collection and analysis across agencies.

The legislation also would create a civil liberties board in the executive branch charged with ensuring that the government’s war on terrorism did not infringe on civil rights and privacy.

Of the California delegation, 10 Republicans voted against the bill. They were: Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach, Ed Royce of Fullerton, Gary G. Miller of Diamond Bar, Mary Bono of Palm Springs, Ken Calvert of Riverside, Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley, Darrell E. Issa of Vista, Doug Ose of Sacramento, Richard W. Pombo of Tracy and George P. Radanovich of Mariposa.

No California Democrats opposed the bill, but Calvin Dooley of Hanford did not vote.