Bush on Notice Despite Win in Congress

President Bush has gotten a fresh education this week in how to deal with an increasingly feisty Congress as he heads into his second term.

The protracted struggle to enact an overhaul of the nation’s intelligence community showed that conservative powerbrokers in Congress could not be steamrollered as easily as when Bush first was elected. Republican leaders are not as willing to “win ugly” as when they rammed his Medicare bill through the House last year, with arm-twisting so aggressive that it drew a rebuke from the Ethics Committee.

The Senate gave final passage to the intelligence bill Wednesday on an 89-2 vote.

The Republican rebellion that slowed action on the intelligence overhaul was a warning sign that Bush will have to speak clearly -- and listen carefully -- to his GOP allies in Congress if he is to hold together his party’s motley coalition of defense hawks, religious activists and economic conservatives.

Any one of those congressional factions can make trouble for the president, especially since the issues on his second-term agenda -- among them, overhauling Social Security, the tax code and immigration law -- are far more divisive within his party than were the tax cuts that headlined his first term.

Resistance to the intelligence bill came from defense hawks who believed that the measure would undercut the Pentagon by reorganizing the government’s spy agencies and creating a new overseer of the intelligence apparatus. Also blocking the bill was a faction of conservatives seeking new immigration restrictions.

A defeat for Bush would have set a bad tone for the beginning of his new term, lawmakers say. In the end, Bush did not have to sacrifice much to appease enough dissidents to break the impasse.

“It’s a feather in his cap,” said Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.).

But the fact that House Republicans for more than two weeks managed to shrug off White House pleas and hold up the bill was a rare display of independence in the chamber, which was the most reliable bastion of Bush loyalists during his first term.

It sent a message that, with Bush’s reelection behind them, Republicans in Congress seemed more willing to assert their own agenda, even if it conflicted with the president’s.

“It’s good when Congress kicks back,” said Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who voted against the intelligence bill. “Congress needs to stand up and hold its ground, or the executive branch will seize more and more power.”

The intelligence measure presented an especially tough political and legislative challenge for the White House, because the issue was essentially thrust onto its agenda by powerful, emotional forces beyond Bush’s control. The bill was based on the recommendations of an independent commission set up to study the Sept. 11 attacks. It was propelled by the impassioned lobbying of families of the terrorists’ victims.

The legislation’s halting progress through Congress was, in part, an object lesson for Bush in the perils of sending mixed signals to Capitol Hill. Bush did embrace legislation incorporating most of the commission recommendations, but for much of this fall, many lawmakers were not convinced the bill was that important to him.

The president’s support was also thrown into doubt, lawmakers said, because Pentagon officials -- including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- had voiced damaging reservations about the bill, in public and in private.

“Rumsfeld was off message and insubordinate,” fumed one Republican supporter of the bill. “The administration does not usually have this problem.”

Questions about Bush’s commitment were so persistent that at one point, he snapped at reporters: “Let’s see if I can say it as plainly as I can: I am for the intelligence bill.”

By contrast, no one ever wondered how heartfelt Bush was about other major initiatives of his administration. On his big 2001 tax cut, for example, Bush’s personal involvement in lobbying was intense and sustained. On the Medicare bill, he made phone calls to wavering members for days -- and into the wee hours on the day of the vote.

On the intelligence bill, Bush did not weigh in with direct lobbying until late in the process, after it became clear the bill could die in the House because of objections by Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) and Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). Hunter worried about the bill’s effect on the military, while Sensenbrenner wanted immigration restrictions included.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) refused to bring the bill to the floor over their objections, though there were enough votes to pass it. GOP leaders were eager to avoid a replay of the ugly scene on the House floor last year, when they brought the Medicare bill to a vote despite strong objections from conservatives in the party. In that case, they had to extend the roll call vote, which usually runs about 15 minutes, for three hours in the middle of the night while Bush and the GOP leadership twisted arms.

On the intelligence bill, the House leaders’ message to the White House was: “Don’t force this down their throats,” said a senior Republican strategist. “They wanted to avoid another Medicare. Members are still [angry] about having to vote for it.”

Relations between House leaders and top White House aides --including political advisor Karl Rove and chief Bush lobbyist David Hobbs -- got testy when they met last week for a closed-door retreat at a Virginia resort to plan next year’s agenda. Talk also turned to the stalled intelligence bill. Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) insisted that the White House had to deal directly with Hunter on his concerns about the bill’s impact on the military chain of command.

When one White House aide questioned whether Hunter was raising objections simply to kill the bill, DeLay bristled. In emphatic tones, he upbraided the aide for challenging the integrity of a House member. “It was an octave higher than normal talk,” said one source in the meeting.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff were deployed to work out a compromise with Hunter, a clear sign of high-level commitment. Cheney was well-suited for the role because he and Hunter had worked together for years when Cheney was a House member.

The deal between them was sealed in a telephone call Sunday night, just as Cheney was preparing to leave for Afghanistan for the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai. That was the basis for the compromise bill that Hunter supported -- and which Sensenbrenner did not, because it did not include the immigration restrictions he sought.

In the final roll call, 67 House Republicans, including Sensenbrenner, voted against the bill -- more GOP defections on a major Bush priority than at any other time in his first term.

White House aides, however, said that did not foretell problems for Bush in his second term.

“I think the president’s agenda is shared by the Republicans in Congress,” White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

But there is a greater chance that the political interests of Republicans in Congress will now diverge from Bush’s. The president is no longer facing reelection, while lawmakers will be on the ballot in 2006. That is why some Republicans in Congress are more edgy than Bush about acting on his plan to overhaul Social Security.

“This is the beginning of the dialogue that’s going to take place between Congress and the administration about whose political priorities are going to be addressed,” said Robert S. Walker, a lobbyist who is a former House GOP leader. “Any time you have a second-term president, you have an agenda the administration wants -- and Congress says, ‘You don’t have to face reelection; we do.’ ”

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Staff writer Mary Curtius contributed to this report.