Revised Drug Bill Expected to Clear House

The House today is expected to approve a revised package of anti-drug legislation that allows the death penalty for some narcotics-related crimes but has been stripped of other provisions that raised contentious civil liberties issues.

Although House Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-Tex.) predicted that the bill will pass the House, the inclusion of the death penalty provision would mean that the legislation could face a crippling--and possibly fatal--filibuster when it reaches the Senate.

Among the controversial provisions deleted from the bill were language allowing the military to pursue and arrest drug smugglers and an amendment allowing the use of illegally obtained evidence in some court cases.

All of the amendments had passed the heavily Democratic House by huge margins but many liberals and moderates conceded privately that they were uncomfortable with the civil liberties issues raised by the provisions.

Those qualms, however, were overwhelmed by the political tides of an election year in which illegal narcotics and the crimes they breed have become intensely emotional issues.

The Senate version of the legislation had included none of those controversial provisions, and House leaders feared that a House-Senate conference committee--the normal forum for ironing out the differences in conflicting legislation--would be unable to reach a compromise before the end of the legislative session.

Instead, they sidestepped the regular procedure and simply rewrote the bill, hoping that the Senate would accept it.

The revised legislation also includes compromises between the funding that the House had hoped to spend--on drug education efforts and on grants to state and local governments--and lower amounts approved by the Senate. Precise overall cost figures were not available.

Wright said that he had received “mixed signals” on how the bill would be received in the Senate, where roughly two dozen senators have suggested that they might filibuster the death penalty provision. However, he said, “we just know it is not possible” to win House passage for the bill unless it includes the death penalty amendment.

The amendment, which Wright said has broad support from both Republicans and Democrats, would allow courts to impose the death penalty on drug “kingpins” whose narcotics operations cause someone’s death.

Such an offense could become one of only a few federal crimes to carry an enforceable death penalty. Although capital punishment ostensibly could be invoked for about a dozen federal crimes, most became law before a 1972 Supreme Court decision overturning the federal methods for imposing the penalty.

A filibuster threat against the death penalty would leave Senate leaders with two options: They could try to overcome the filibuster, which would require several of the few remaining days of the congressional session, or they could strip the bill of the capital punishment provision and send it back to the House.

While including the death penalty could bring strong opposition in the Senate, deleting the other amendments brought stinging denunciation from conservative House members. Rep. Duncan L. Hunter (R-Coronado) was particularly critical of the abandonment of his amendment expanding the military role in fighting drugs.

The proposal had been rejected by the Senate and strongly opposed by the Pentagon, which Hunter said was trying to “dodge the draft in the drug war.”