Vote Will Transform Government for Battle Against Terrorism
David Firestone, The New York Times
The Senate voted yesterday to reorganize scattered elements of the federal government around the intensely focused goal of combating terrorism, approving the creation of a huge Department of Homeland Security in Washington’s biggest transformation in 50 years.
Ending months of rancorous debate on the new department, the Senate approved the bill on a 90-9 vote that disguised the deep misgivings many Democrats still harbor about President Bush’s design for the agency. Only after urgent phone calls from the president and last-minute promises by Republican leaders to eliminate several special-interest business provisions did wavering moderates from both parties agree to the final vote.
The House approved the same bill last week, and after a few technical differences between the bills are resolved by House leaders on Friday, the bill is expected to be on the president’s desk for signature before month’s end. Even so, it will likely be years before the new department has fully assumed all its functions. “We’re making great progress in the war on terror,” Bush told Senate Republicans in a conference call yesterday afternoon. “Part of that progress will be the ability for us to protect the American people at home. This is a very important piece of legislation. It is landmark in its scope.”
Not since the Truman administration upended the nation’s defense apparatus to fight the Cold War in 1947 has the government been reshaped so dramatically around a single purpose. Once the department goes into existence 60 days from Bush’s signature, it will slowly begin to absorb 22 of Washington’s signature functions, including immigration, border protection, emergency management, intelligence analysis and the protection of the president himself.
The FBI and the CIA, the two most prominent anti-terrorism agencies, will not be moved to the new department. But the department will have a strong new intelligence division that will analyze many of the same threats to American soil examined by those agencies, and may even reach differing conclusions on which threats are the most serious.
A department work force that could eventually surpass 170,000 employees around the world will answer to a new Cabinet secretary, who will almost certainly be Tom Ridge, now the director of the White House homeland security office. The workers will be required to discard their old departmental loyalties and begin a new cooperation to prevent terrorist attacks and respond to those that occur.
Many of those workers will also find themselves without their customary Civil Service job protections, an issue that held up approval of the department for months. The entire process, in fact, was far more bitter than anyone expected in June, when Bush adopted a Democratic idea for the department and began promoting it as his own, after adding changes that would give him more management flexibility than in most other departments.
The department and Bush’s plan to curtail Civil Service protections became a divisive issue in the midterm elections, and the decision to fight Bush’s plans helped cost two Democratic senators their jobs and their party its control over the Senate.
Eight Democrats voted against the bill: Daniel K. Akaka of Alaska, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Carl Levin of Michigan and Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland. James M. Jeffords, a Vermont independent, also voted against the bill, and Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska was not present for the vote.
Even in the last week, Democrats became incensed at a last-minute move by House Republican leaders to include a series of pro-business provisions in the bill. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota called the move “shabby government” and said the Republicans should be ashamed of such actions.
But the Democratic effort to strip the bill of the provisions fell short yesterday on a 52-47 vote that came after extensive arm-twisting of wavering senators by Bush. Three Democrats and three moderate Republicans said they were persuaded to vote the president’s way after the Republicans promised to alter three of the most bitterly contested provisions early next year.
The three provisions would establish a university research center for homeland security, most probably at Texas A&M University; would allow many businesses that have left the country to evade federal taxes to contract with the new department; and would provide legal protection to companies that make ingredients for vaccines.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and several other senators said they had received an “ironclad promise” from Senate and House Republican leaders and the White House essentially to rescind the provisions in the first spending bill to pass through Congress next year.
Having lost the first battle with the president over job security, and the second battle with the House over the new provisions, many Democrats felt obliged to swallow their pride and vote for the bill on final passage. Daschle said there was language in the bill that Congress would regret, and predicted that more legislation would be needed to correct the problems he said were built in.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., whose Governmental Affairs committee first proposed the department more than a year ago, when the White House was dismissing the idea, said he was “thrilled” that a department largely of his architecture was finally approved.
“It took too long to happen, and there are many things here I disagree with,” he said. “But the good far outweighs the bad. It’s very significant and critically important development for the security of the American people.”
Phil Gramm of Texas, the president’s chief Senate supporter in changing the civil service protections in the bill, acknowledged that Democrats had written 95 percent of the bill and acknowledged the paradoxical role of small-government Republicans like him in advocating for such a large department.
Faced with the strong possibility the bill would not be approved yesterday, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi scrambled to quell the rebellion by promising his caucus to undo what they considered to be the three most egregious House provisions. When Chafee and others asked for a similar promise from the House, Lott tracked down Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., in Turkey, along with incoming House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-Texas, and extracted their promises to do the same.