Spying Reform Bill Is Tottering

Politically sensitive immigration provisions and opposition from the Pentagon are threatening to derail a high-priority bill to consolidate authority over the nation’s intelligence system, House and Senate negotiators said Tuesday.

Negotiators are due to meet for the first time today in a session that could determine whether the measure will be passed before the election -- as President Bush and many lawmakers have urged -- or delayed until next year.

“Clearly, not as much has happened by now as I had wished,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who coauthored the Senate version of the bill. If no progress is made at today’s session, he said, “it is going to be hard to get something done before the election. And that is a terrible lost opportunity.”

The House and Senate passed separate versions of intelligence reform shortly before adjourning last month. The bills came in response to the Sept. 11 commission, which found that faulty intelligence had contributed to the success of the 2001 terrorist attacks and recommended that a national intelligence director be given authority over the budgets and top appointees of the government’s 15 intelligence agencies.

The Senate bill would give substantial authority to the national intelligence director; the House bill would give less. The House bill, unlike the Senate’s, would make it easier to deport asylum seekers, even if they faced torture in their home country, and it would expand the category of aliens subject to quick deportation.

House and Senate staffers who have been negotiating since last weekend reported no progress on these and related questions, said participants.

Democrats have criticized the immigration provisions as intending to force a politically difficult choice between voting for measures they say are anti-immigrant and opposing a bill seen as necessary to bolster the ailing intelligence system’s ability to fight terrorists.

Bush on Monday called on Congress to finish the bill quickly. In a 10-page letter sent to Republican leaders Monday night, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said the White House wanted to see a strong national intelligence director. It “strongly opposes” the expansion in the House bill of government powers to expel illegal aliens, she added.

The White House also opposes the Senate bill’s provision that would disclose the overall budget figure for intelligence, Rice said.

“It seems that the White House is reacting to growing pressure from crucial voter groups, like Cubans in Florida, in opposing some of the anti-immigration provisions,” said Laura Murphy, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the immigration provisions.

House Republican negotiators continued to insist that the immigration measures were crucial for securing the nation against terrorists. They also raised questions, participants in the negotiations said, about whether a national intelligence director was a good idea.

Reform supporters worried that delaying the bill until after the November elections risked a loss of the political momentum that propelled the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s intelligence system through the House and Senate at a breakneck pace in September.

“I can’t understand how this has become a political football,” said Mary Fetchet, a member of the Families Steering Committee, a lobbying group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims. Fetchet and other family members have spent weeks in Washington urging lawmakers to pass the legislation.

“The safety of our nation is at stake,” said Fetchet, who lost her son in the attack on the World Trade Center. “These people are elected officials and they should be acting in our best interests. Why are we delaying this longer?”

Spokesmen for the House and Senate Republican leadership blamed each other.

“People are very frustrated,” said Stuart Roy, spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

But Bob Stevenson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), said he feared the House leadership was “laying the groundwork for failure by putting the blame at the Senate’s doorstep.”

Even with the best of intentions, lawmakers will be hard-pressed to get the job done in just two weeks. Each bill is more than 500 pages long.

“People are getting increasingly distracted as we get closer and closer to the election,” said one senior Senate Republican staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This is a pretty sweeping reorganization of the United States government, and there ain’t that much time.”

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think thank that has raised concerns about the reform efforts, said the momentum to complete a bill slowed as other issues pushed to the top of the presidential campaign agenda.

In addition, he said, the Defense Department quietly lobbied against the bill, which many there see as a threat to its access to intelligence. The department now controls 80% of the intelligence budget, but the Senate version of the legislation would shift much of that to a national intelligence director.

“If you look at this as a train running out of steam, the Pentagon would be the people lying across the tracks screaming,” Lewis said.

A Pentagon spokesman insisted Tuesday night, however, that the Pentagon had no separate position on the bill from the White House.

“Our position should be well known on this. It’s the president’s bill,” spokesman Bryan Whitman said.