House Intelligence Measure Targeted

Eager to get an intelligence reform bill through Congress before the Nov. 2 elections, the White House is pressing to get controversial immigration provisions stripped from the House measure, Republican lawmakers said Tuesday.

Both the House and Senate are moving toward final votes this week on differing versions of bills that seek to overhaul the nation’s intelligence community by putting a single director in charge of all 15 agencies. Both major parties are eager to take credit for completing the most sweeping intelligence changes since the Cold War.

The more comprehensive House version includes provisions to tighten border controls and make it easier for law enforcement to track and quickly deport suspected terrorists.

Democrats have joined civil libertarians, members of the Sept. 11 commission and families of victims of those attacks in criticizing the measures. Democrats describe the provisions as “poison pills” that threaten the chances for reconciling the two chambers’ bills.

House Republicans said Tuesday that they believed the White House was fearful of a backlash against the House bill by immigrant voters.

“I sincerely hope that the White House is not seriously thinking about walking away from this effort in the interest of political expediency in a few states,” said Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo).

Tancredo, chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, said in interviews that their staffs had been told by the House leadership that the White House wanted the immigration provisions removed from the bill. Both men said they urged the leadership to resist the pressure.

The White House, according to King and Tancredo, has specifically targeted provisions in the House bill that would make it easier to deport illegal immigrants , make it harder to use foreign consular identity cards as forms of identity in the United States and make it harder for illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses by imposing federal standards.

The American Civil Liberties Union has denounced those measures as “anti-immigrant policies” it says would “deny immigrants basic judicial review over unfair, arbitrary or otherwise abusive deportations” and allow suspected terrorists to be deported to countries “lacking a functioning government.”

The House leadership says it stands behind its bill and all its provisions, and that it will bring it to a floor vote Thursday or Friday. But a White House spokesman said Tuesday that negotiations over the bill’s provisions were continuing.

“What I can say is that the president supports strong, effective immigration reform,” said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman.

“We will continue to work with members of the House on their proposal. We continue to meet with them -- to work with them on the legislation. It is a work in progress.”

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said no one had spoken to him about removing provisions of the bill.

“Whether it be redesigning our intelligence-gathering capabilities or protecting our borders or going after terrorists,” DeLay said, all the measures “are designed to keep Americans safer.”

But pressure has been mounting on the House Republican leadership to produce a bill that looks more like the Senate version.

Editorials across the country have criticized the House bill for endangering prospects for quickly completing real reform of the intelligence community.

The Senate, on the other hand, has been praised for producing a bipartisan bill, coauthored by Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

With the political maneuvering around the bills intensifying, Republicans and Democrats in the House held competing news conferences Tuesday, each producing family members of Sept. 11 victims to bolster arguments for or against the legislation.

At one point, family members who support the House bill clashed publicly with family members who gathered with Democrats and Sept. 11 commission members to demand that the controversial provisions be dropped.

Both the Senate and House bills call for the creation of a national intelligence director to oversee the nation’s 15 intelligence agencies. But the Senate version would give the director greater control over the intelligence community’s budgets and personnel than the House version would.

House Democrats have pushed the leadership unsuccessfully to allow a floor debate on a substitute bill that would more closely conform to the Senate version.

The Senate bill, which has survived seven days of floor debate largely intact, is expected to be voted on today. Differences between the final versions of the bill will be dealt with in a conference committee.