House Leadership Blocks Vote on Intelligence Bill ( bill could "endanger our troops in the field.")

ASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - House Republican leaders blocked and appeared to kill a bill Saturday that would have enacted the major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, refusing to allow a vote on the legislation despite last-minute pleas from both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to Republican lawmakers for a compromise before Congress adjourned for the year.

The decision to block a vote on the landmark bill, which would have created the job of a cabinet-level national intelligence director to oversee the C.I.A. and the government's other spy agencies, came after what lawmakers from both parties described as a near-rebellion by a core of highly conservative House Republicans aligned with the Pentagon who were emboldened to stand up to their leadership and to the White House.

The bill would have forced the Pentagon, which controls an estimated 80 percent of the government's $40 billion intelligence budget, to cede much of its authority on intelligence issues to a national intelligence director.

"What you are seeing is the forces in favor of the status quo protecting their turf, whether it is Congress or in the bureaucracy," said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who was the chief Senate author of the failed compromise bill, in what amounted to a slap at her Republican counterparts in the House.

The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and the former governor of New Jersey, said that the lawmakers who blocked the vote should be held accountable by the public, and he blamed senior Pentagon officials as well.

"I think there's no question that there are people in the Pentagon who want the status quo, and they fought very hard with their allies in Congress for the status quo," Mr. Kean said.

The decision to block a vote was announced by the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, who said that his members had determined that the bill hammered out by a House-Senate conference committee earlier in the day might dangerously dilute the authority of the military commanders over intelligence issues and could "endanger our troops in the field."

"It's hard to reform; it's hard to make change," Mr. Hastert said, only hours after House and Senate negotiators ended a monthlong stalemate and announced their agreement. "We are going to keep working on this."

While Mr. Hastert said that the negotiations would continue and that as a result he would not formally adjourn the House for the year, many lawmakers said the action had effectively killed the legislation. Saturday was supposed to be the last day of business for the House and Senate in their so-called lame-duck session after the election, with many lawmakers not expected to return to Washington until January.

The decision to block a vote was seen by the bill's proponents and others in Congress as a surprising embarrassment to the president, who had personally intervened as late as Friday night to pressure rebellious House Republicans to agree on an intelligence bill, and to Mr. Hastert, who had signaled that he wanted the legislation and was willing to overrule the opposition from within his ranks.

Congressional officials said that Mr. Bush had telephoned a leading Republican critic of the bill, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, from Air Force One on Friday en route to a economic summit meeting in Chile to urge him to compromise.

They said a similar call was made Saturday morning by Mr. Cheney to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter of California, who has long warned that the creation of a national intelligence director could interfere with the military chain of command as American troops continue to fight in Iraq.

But the calls were to no avail, since House and Senate negotiators agreed that the continuing opposition of Mr. Sensenbrenner, Mr. Hunter and a handful of other influential Republicans had tipped the balance for Mr. Hastert in deciding to block a vote.

Less than three weeks after Democrats suffered a stinging defeat at the polls, the bill's failure could provide Democratic leaders with a political opening to argue - along with members of the Sept. 11 commission and the families of victims of the terrorist attacks - that House Republicans killed a bill that had widespread, bipartisan support and that would have allowed the government to protect the public better against terrorist threats.

"Today, the House Republicans missed an opportunity to make the American people safer," said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. "Their inability to overhaul our intelligence system is a staggering failure."

Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and one of the authors of the compromise bill, said, "This is a tragedy for America." Ms. Harman added, "If there is another major terrorist attack on our soil - and sadly, there will likely be one - we will have only ourselves to blame. Congress had a chance to protect America, and Congress failed."

The decision appeared also to reflect a sharp split between Republicans in the House and Senate. Senate Republicans voted unanimously last month to support a version of the intelligence bill that had been endorsed by both the Sept. 11 commission and the White House and that would have granted sweeping budget and personnel authority to a national intelligence director.

In its final report in July, the commission cataloged the blunders and turf battles of the nation's spy agencies in the months and years before the Sept. 11 attacks and called for the appointment of a powerful intelligence director to force them to cooperate.

At a news conference on Saturday to explain the tumultuous events of the day, Mr. Hastert singled out Mr. Hunter as instrumental in the decision to prevent a final vote on the bill. Mr. Hunter, a member of the House-Senate conference committee that shaped the compromise bill, had opposed the final product when it was made public on Saturday morning, warning colleagues that it could interfere with the transfer of vital intelligence to soldiers on the battlefield.

Mr. Hunter's views reflected those of senior Pentagon officials, who have quietly lobbied for months to block the creation of the job of a powerful national intelligence director, the central recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission.

In an interview, Mr. Hunter predicted that Congress would eventually approve an intelligence-overhaul bill, but one that would not permit a national intelligence director to interfere with the transfer of intelligence within the military and "leave a state of confusion, which is deadly on the battlefield."

"I'm very proud today of House Republicans and the House Republican leadership," he said. "They care. If they didn't care, Denny Hastert could have hammered this thing across the goal line."

He said that during his telephone call with the vice president, Mr. Cheney had said "he wanted to have a compromise and wanted to have a bill." But Mr. Hunter said the vice president "also very much understands the importance of this lifeline between the combatants and the troops."

A spokesman for the Defense Department, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, rejected the suggestion by Mr. Kean and other proponents of the compromise bill that Pentagon officials were behind Saturday's developments. "What goes on on Capitol Hill is entirely within their purview," he said. "We don't have a vote."

House and Senate negotiators said that Mr. Sensenbrenner had been equally responsible for the decision to block a vote on the bill, which did not include a variety of provisions he had championed to broaden the powers of law-enforcement and immigration agencies.

They said Mr. Sensenbrenner had been adamant that the bill include a provision to create federal standards for drivers' licenses to prevent them from being issued to illegal immigrants, a move widely criticized by civil liberties groups as a step toward a national identification card.

"Regrettably, the Senate thus far has been hellbent on ensuring illegal aliens can receive drivers' licenses, regardless of the security concerns," Mr. Sensenbrenner said in a statement.

"Regrettably, the Senate thus far has been hellbent on ensuring illegal aliens can receive drivers' licenses, regardless of the security concerns," Mr. Sensenbrenner said in a statement."

Thank you,Mr. Sensenbrenner. The refusal of the Senate to do anything to protect the borders is pitiful. Here's what Don Rumsfeld had to say this week:

This is a partial transcript of the Lou Dobbs program on CNN from 11/16/04

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/16/ldt.01.html

DOBBS: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is warning of the threat of terrorists entering this country through the same routes as those used by illegal aliens. Secretary Rumsfeld, traveling in South America, warned that enemies look for weaknesses and take advantage of them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: The risk is that some of these human-smuggling routes into our country from this hemisphere could be used just as easily for terrorists.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DOBBS: And three million illegal aliens are estimated to be entering this country this year.

Secretary Rumsfeld also said the United States has to be, as he put it, smarter and quicker in securing our borders. The federal government's failure to secure those borders is leading individual states to take action. Arizona's Proposition 200, which limits state benefits for illegals, passed overwhelmingly two weeks ago. Now at least half a dozen other states are considering similar measures.

Oh he is still asking for open borders and so much more. Vincente Fox was just on CNN. He said he was assured yesterday by Pres. Bush that the "Totalization agreement" with Mexico will go forward. Here's some on that:

Totalization: Sellout of American Workers

by Phyllis Schlafly
Nov. 17, 2004
The Democrats are trying to make a campaign issue out of George W. Bush's alleged plan to "privatize" Social Security, scaring seniors into thinking their checks will be cut off. That is a phony issue; all Bush suggests is to offer younger workers the option (not the compulsion) of transferring a very small part of their Social Security benefit into private investments.

The real threat to Social Security doesn't come from giving young people this opportunity. The threat comes from the Bush Administration's plan to load illegal aliens into the Social Security system, an idea that would skyrocket costs and bankrupt the system at the same time that baby boomers flood into their benefit years.

The code word for this racket is "totalization." The United States has totalization agreements with 20 other countries, which have been reasonable and non-controversial, but totalization with Mexico is TOTALLY different.

The idea behind totalization with other countries is to assure a pension to those few individuals who work legally in two countries by "totalizing" their payments into the pension systems of both countries. All existing totalization agreements are with developed nations whose retirement benefits are on a parity with U.S. benefits, and the affected employees work for companies that have been paying taxes into the other countries' retirement systems.

Workers from the other 20 countries come with documents from their employer verifying that they are authorized to work in the United States. Only a minuscule fraction of Mexicans enter with such documents.

The legitimate goal of totalization with other countries is to avoid double taxation for retirement when employers assign their employees to work temporarily in another country. Reciprocity works because there is rough parity between the number of U.S. workers in the 20 other countries and the foreigners from those countries who work in the United States.

But this goal has no relevance to Mexico. There is no parity whatsoever between the number of Mexicans working in the United States and the number of U.S. citizens working in Mexico, and absolutely no parity in the social security systems of the two countries.

Mexican benefits are not remotely equal to U.S. benefits. Americans receive benefits after working for 10 years, but Mexicans have to work 24 years before receiving any benefits.

Mexican workers receive back in retirement only what they actually paid in, plus interest, whereas the U.S. Social Security system is skewed to give lower-wage earners benefits greatly in excess of what they and their employers contributed.

Mexico has two different retirement programs, one for public-sector employees, which is draining the national treasury, and one for private-sector workers, which is estimated to cover only 40 percent of the workforce. The rest of the workers are in the off-the-record economy (euphemistically called the "informal" sector).

The 10 million Mexicans who have illegally entered the United States previously lived in poverty, did not pay social security taxes in Mexico, and did not work for employers who paid taxes into a retirement plan. If they were working at all, it was in the off-the-record economy.

Illegality is no issue with the countries where we have existing totalization agreements because none of them accounts for even one percent of the U.S illegal population. On the other hand, Mexico provides more than two-thirds of the illegals in the United States.

The Bush totalization plan would pay out billions in Social Security benefits to Mexicans for work they did in the U.S. using fraudulent Social Security numbers, something that Americans would go to jail for doing. It would pay Social Security Disability benefits to Mexicans who worked in the United States as little as 3 years.

The Bush totalization plan would lure even more Mexicans into the United States illegally in the hope of amnesty and eligibility for Social Security benefits. The Bush plan would even cover the Mexicans' spouses and dependents who may never have lived in the United States.

Since few if any of the illegal aliens have built up any equity in the Mexican retirement system, what is there to totalize? Totalization is a plan for the U.S. taxpayers to end up assuming the entire burden.

When George W. Bush became President in 2001, the Mexican government expected the United States to pass amnesty (disguised as a guest worker plan and "regularizing" the entry of Mexicans). After 9/11, Mexico's national policy turned to increasing the number of its nationals working in the United States and getting them to qualify for all the social benefits and privileges Americans receive, from driver's licenses to Social Security and Social Security Disability.

The Social Security commissioners of both Mexico and the Bush Administration signed a totalization agreement in June of 2004, but the text of the agreement has been kept secret. Maybe we will be permitted to see it after the President approves it and sends it to Congress.

Let your Members of Congress know you want them to stop this billion-dollar sellout of American workers and taxpayers.
http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2004/nov04/04-11-17.html

The two congressmen who are fighting dems and pubs to keep the borders safe are Sensenbrenner and Hostettler. Here are the contacts to thank them and ask them to keep those immigration provisions in the intelligence bill:

Hostettler - Outside the Milwaukee Metro calling area, call my toll-free HOTLINE number: 1-800-242-1119.
Washington, D.C. Office
To write about issues pending in Congress, internships, flags, or tours, contact:

2449 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-4905
Telephone: (202) 225-5101

Washington, DC Office
1214 Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515
TEL: (202) 225-4636
FAX: (202) 225-3284

Email- John.Hostettler@mail.house.gov
******
Sensenbrenner

Outside the Milwaukee Metro calling area, call my toll-free HOTLINE number: 1-800-242-1119.

Washington, D.C. Office
To write about issues pending in Congress, internships, flags, or tours, contact:

2449 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-4905
Telephone: (202) 225-5101
My e-mail address is sensenbrenner@mail.house.gov.
If you contact me through e-mail, please include your postal mailing address and phone number.

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