Bush Scores Intelligence Bill Victory

President Bush on Monday won crucial backing for a bill to put the nation’s intelligence agencies under a single director’s control, setting the stage for congressional passage this week.

The White House secured the support of House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) by changing the bill’s language to ensure that the military’s access to intelligence from satellites or other sources would not be impeded by a national intelligence czar. Senate negotiators said they had devised the language and that Vice President Dick Cheney had lobbied Hunter over the weekend.

Hunter’s support was thought to guarantee that a majority of House Republicans would vote for the bill, even though another prominent committee chairman -- Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) -- said he continued to oppose it.

Passage of the bill would be a political victory for Bush, who has urged Congress to create a national intelligence director with authority over the budgets and personnel of America’s 15 spy agencies.

The president suffered an embarrassing setback last month when Hunter joined with Sensenbrenner, who leads the Judiciary Committee, to block the legislation the day that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) planned to bring it to the floor for a vote.

Since then, members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission and family members of the terrorists’ victims repeatedly have called on the president to use his influence to get the bill passed.

Bush’s ability to move the legislation -- over opposition from the Pentagon and its backers -- has become a test of his political clout as he prepares to launch his second term. The president has said that he plans to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda that will include efforts to restructure Social Security and alter the nation’s tax code. He is eager to demonstrate that the newly expanded congressional Republican majorities in the House and Senate are united behind his leadership.

In a statement Monday evening, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), coauthors of the Senate version of the intelligence bill, said the new language preserved “the strong budget and other authorities that the director of national intelligence needs to fight the war on terrorism and counter other emerging threats.”

Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, said that its members were pleased with the compromise and “cautiously optimistic” that the bill would be signed into law by week’s end.

The legislation is based largely on the recommendations the commission made in its final report in July. At that time, the panel said that the failure of spy agencies to share information and cooperate -- and the absence of an overall director -- hampered efforts to defend the nation against terrorist attacks.

The House planned to vote on the bill today and the Senate on Wednesday, the last working day of the 108th Congress.

In a letter to Congress on Monday, Bush said that the national intelligence director would have “the ability to oversee and integrate all the foreign and domestic activities of the intelligence community, to achieve the unity of purpose needed to win the global war on terrorism.”

Hunter had opposed the legislation on the grounds that a national intelligence director could disrupt the direct link between U.S. combat troops and the real-time intelligence they need in battle. Sensenbrenner opposes it because the Senate refused to include controversial law enforcement and immigration provisions that his committee had written into the House bill.

In a nod to Sensenbrenner and other House opponents who said the bill failed to crack down on illegal immigrants, Bush said he looked forward to working with Congress “early in the next session to address these other issues.”

At an afternoon news conference, Hunter and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) said they believed the new language ensured that a national director would not impede the military’s access to intelligence, particularly during times of war.

The pair said they were on the phone to Cheney several times Sunday night.

“Today has been a good day for the people who wear the uniform of the United States military,” Hunter said.

He and Warner said they believed they had managed to protect “the time-tested chain of command.” But one key House aide who was close to the negotiations said that the two had been handed “a fig leaf” that did not diminish a national intelligence director’s authority over budgets and personnel.

Family members of the Sept. 11 victims, some of whom were holding a vigil outside the White House on Monday evening, said they had not yet seen the new language but expected to support the bill if the Sept. 11 commissioners did.

At an emotional news conference Monday morning, when the bill’s fate seemed to hang in the balance, family members who haunted the halls of Congress during the effort to get the legislation passed wept as they pleaded for lawmakers’ support.

“Our passion was driven by the belief that Sept. 11 was preventable,” said Mary Fetchet, whose son was killed at the World Trade Center. “President Bush must use his political capital to overrule the obstructionists.”

It was clear Monday night that there was still opposition to the bill among some House Republicans.

“Even with these improvements, the current bill is woefully incomplete and one I cannot support,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement. “Americans deserve a complete bill so that we can prevent another 9/11 from occurring. Border security and immigration reform are vital components of our homeland security efforts, so why are they not included in this legislation?”

Sensenbrenner said he regarded promises that the next Congress would address immigration and law enforcement provisions dropped from the bill as “hollow.”

Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo.), a proponent of tougher immigration laws, told CNN that the fight over the bill had exposed a “deep division that is growing deeper every minute” within the Republican Party over immigration reform, with some conservatives differing with the president over how strongly to control illegal immigration.

In addition to creating a director who would serve as the president’s chief advisor on intelligence and be in charge of the nation’s spy agencies, the legislation would create a national counter-terrorism center to coordinate the collection and analysis of intelligence across agencies. It also would create a board to try to ensure that the government’s fight against terrorism did not infringe on civil liberties and privacy rights.

The bill, which is more than 600 pages long, contains other provisions meant to bolster the nation’s battle against terrorism. Over the next five years, it would add 40,000 beds for the detention of illegal immigrants apprehended by federal officials; increase the number of Border Patrol officers by 10,000; and add 4,000 immigration inspectors.

It also would toughen law enforcement measures meant to deal with potential terrorists. The bill has a provision that would allow the government to more easily obtain subpoenas to track suspected “lone wolf” terrorists who may be operating independently. Another provision would expand the definition of “material support” to make it easier to prosecute people suspected of giving aid to terrorists.

But items in the House bill that Sensenbrenner fought to preserve have been dropped, including several that would have heightened the burden of proof on asylum-seekers and one that would have barred immigrants from using a matricula consular card -- such as those issued by the Mexican government -- as identification to federal officials. Sensenbrenner had argued that the documents were too easily forged.

The final bill also drops a provision that would have banned states from issuing drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants, as 11 states do.