Filibuster Broken, Senate OKs Calif. Desert Protection : Legislation: Millions of acres affected. Death Valley, Joshua Tree to be national parks; vast wilderness areas within them are created. Stormy 103rd Congress adjourns.

The Senate, breaking an impasse stretching back nearly a decade, voted Saturday to approve the California Desert Protection Act, creating two new national parks and carving out millions of acres of federally protected wilderness areas in Southern and eastern California.

The legislation, which for years was bogged down in a dispute between former California senators, was adopted handily--but only after its supporters broke a Republican filibuster that threatened to add the measure to the long list of legislation doomed by partisan discord in the final days of the 103rd Congress.

Hours after the vote, the Senate adjourned for the year. But like the House, which adjourned at 12:05 a.m. Saturday, the upper chamber will reconvene in seven weeks for a special session to consider a global trade measure.

The Clinton Administration and environmental groups described the desert bill, which now awaits the President’s signature, as an epic triumph. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt called it “America’s most significant environmental victory in more than a decade.”

In a statement released by the White House, President Clinton called the bill’s passage “a clear-cut victory for the people of California and everyone across America who cares about this nation’s great natural heritage.”

It was also a success for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who vowed during her campaign two years ago to make the legislation a priority.

“This is something I ran to do,” a beaming Feinstein said as she prepared to return to California to resume her tight reelection race against Rep. Mike Huffington (R-Santa Barbara.) “It was a promise I made in my campaign.”

The bill designates 69 new Bureau of Land Management parcels totaling 3.5 million acres as wilderness, elevates the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments to national parks--which affords greater protection--and creates 4 million more acres of wilderness in those parks and a new national preserve in the East Mojave.

Most of the land already belongs to the federal government.

The terrain is filled with ecological diversity, including several mountain ranges, huge sand dunes, some 2,000 plant and 600 animal species, more than 100,000 archeological sites and even dinosaur tracks.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, described the legislation as “the fruition of two decades of activism on behalf of desert protection.”

For supporters, however, elation was preceded by some tense moments when, even after voting began on the Senate floor, key backers of the measure were nowhere in sight.

Several Democrats had been home campaigning and attempted to fly back to Washington in the nick of time--some aboard private charters hastily arranged by an unlikely travel agent.

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) could be seen in a cloakroom just off the Senate floor, carrying on conversations over two phones. On one, Mitchell had a senator who was campaigning in his home state; on the other was a private aircraft company. Mitchell was making arrangements.

Among those who returned with barely time to spare was Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.). He landed at National Airport in Washington only minutes before the vote to cut off the filibuster began.

Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) was even later, delayed by a mechanized garage door that would not open as she was leaving home.

When she finally burst into the Senate chamber, a broad grin on her face, a collective sigh of relief was heard from Democrats. Then Moseley-Braun and Feinstein happily embraced in the middle of the chamber as an insouciant clerk continued calling the roll.

The final vote to end debate was 68 to 23, eight votes more than needed. All 23 opponents were Republicans, though another 14 GOP senators broke ranks to join with the Democratic majority. Immediately afterward, the Senate gave the bill final approval on a voice vote.

Efforts to develop coherent California desert management policies date to the 1970s. Once the issue reached Congress in 1986, however, it became mired in disputes between two former California senators: Democrat Alan Cranston, who first introduced the legislation, and Republican Pete Wilson.

This year, with California’s senators both Democrats, the measure seemed a shoo-in. The Senate approved its initial bill by a 69-29 vote and the House approved a somewhat different measure, 298 to 128. A conference report that reconciled the two versions was approved by the House on a voice vote Friday morning.

But Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) and several other Western senators mounted a filibuster, hoping to kill the measure as time was running out on this Congress.

That prompted Feinstein and her allies to accuse the Republicans of seeking to deny her a legislative victory that she could tout in her reelection campaign. Just before the votes Saturday morning, for instance, Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), labeled the GOP filibuster “raw politics.”

But Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Ida.), a former rancher, denied such charges. “It is not about politics. It is about how we will manage a very large chunk of federal property.”

He and Wallop, who is retiring, said the creation of parks would severely strain the ability of the National Park Service to maintain the quality of existing facilities.

They also argued that the bill was another example of the federal government’s “war on the West” and individual property rights. “What we’re doing is taking a vast piece of land off the map,” Craig complained.

But Feinstein countered that she had made numerous accommodations to protect private property, grazing, continuation of existing mining operations and other measures to get broad support.

Taking the floor minutes before the Senate voted to end his filibuster, Wallop agreed with Feinstein that the bill had become embroiled in partisan politics. But he said it was Feinstein who had “made it political.”

In any case, Democrats wasted little time after the vote to lavish praise on Feinstein.

Johnston, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, appeared with Feinstein at a press conference and said: “Some people chose to make it a referendum on the effectiveness of Dianne Feinstein. And we have seen the results. It is the most remarkable one-senator bill I’ve seen up here in 22 years.”

Earlier, as the debate focused on the merits of the measure, Craig challenged Johnston’s assertion that the bill would prevent commercialization of wilderness areas--specifically a proliferation of “hamburger palaces.”

Quite the contrary, Craig predicted, the conversion of Death Valley and Joshua Tree into national parks would draw even more tourists and with them, “hamburger palaces.”

In the final hour of debate on Saturday morning, the Senate chamber also echoed with florid, even rapturous, descriptions of the beauty of California’s deserts as members on both sides of the debate sought to outdo one another in professing their love--and determination to protect--the state’s wilderness.

Johnston called it “a feeling akin to love of family.” Craig, who said he had spent countless hours in California’s wilderness, confessed, “I’ve learned to love it.”

Among the many compromises along the way was one involving the status of the East Mojave National Scenic Area.

The Senate had upgraded the land to national park status, which would forbid hunting. But the House, pressured by hunters and the National Rifle Assn., made the land simply a preserve, where hunting would be allowed to continue. The final bill contained the House language.

“We are disappointed,” said Norbert Riedy, a Wilderness Society official. “But, given the huge amount of land that is now protected under this bill, we are ecstatic. . . . It is the most significant land protection bill since the Alaska Lands Act of 1980.”

The desert bill was the last major piece of legislation to clear Congress. But the Senate, still struggling toward adjournment, had to overcome one final GOP filibuster before weary and surly senators could follow their House colleagues out of Washington.

Among its final actions, the Senate approved a compromise measure to require the makers of dietary supplements to put disclaimers on the labels of products for which they have made unsubstantiated health claims.

It also approved the installation of new equipment to allow the FBI to monitor calls made over digitalized public- and cellular-phone systems. And the “nanny tax” bill was approved, which exempts household employers from having to pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes of their domestic workers, unless the workers are paid more than $1,000 per year. All three measures were passed earlier by the House.

But adjournment still would not come for several more hours as Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) insisted on speaking at length against the promotions of several senior Air Force officers implicated in mismanagement scandals.

Under immense pressure from his antsy colleagues, Grassley finally agreed to drop his threatened filibuster and allow the promotions to pass, whereupon the exhausted senators went home.

Times staff writer Michael Ross contributed to this story.