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Nov 19 homeland bill { November 20 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/politics/20HOME.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/politics/20HOME.html
November 20, 2002
Senate Votes, 90-9, to Set Up Homeland Security Department Geared to Fight Terrorism
By DAVID FIRESTONE
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 — The Senate voted today to reorganize broad elements of a scattered federal government around a focused response to 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-to-9 vote that hid some misgivings many Democrats said they still harbored 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 before month's end. Even so, it will probably be years before the new department has fully assumed all its functions.
"We're making great progress in the war on terror," Mr. Bush told Senate Republicans in a conference call this 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."
With a work force of nearly 170,000 employees around the world, the department will be led by a new cabinet secretary, who will almost certainly be Tom Ridge, now the director of the White House domestic security office.
Facing a need for the workers to discard their old loyalties and begin a new cooperation to prevent terrorist attacks and respond to those that occur, Mr. Ridge said, "We're going to look for advice and counsel from a lot of folks."
Not since Congress and the Truman administration upended the nation's military 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 Mr. 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 F.B.I. and the C.I.A., the two most prominent antiterrorism 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.
Many workers in the new department 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 Mr. Bush adopted a Democratic idea for the department and added changes that would give him more management flexibility than in most other departments.
The department and Mr. Bush's plan to curtail Civil Service protections became an issue in the midterm elections, and the decision to fight the plan was widely acknowledged as helping cost two Democratic senators their jobs and their party its control over the Senate.
Eight Democrats voted against the bill: Senators 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. Senator James M. Jeffords, Independent of Vermont, also voted against it, and Senator Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska was not present.
Even in the last week, Democrats became incensed at a last-minute move by House Republican leaders to include several pro-business provisions in the bill. Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, 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 today on a 52-to-47 vote that came after extensive arm-twisting of wavering senators by President 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 domestic security, most probably at Texas A&M University; would allow many businesses that have left the country to avoid federal taxes to contract with the new department; and would provide legal protection to companies that make ingredients for vaccines.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of 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.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, 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.
"We finally have a bill which does what I wanted us to do for more than a year now, which is to organize our dangerously disorganized homeland defenses in response to Sept. 11," Mr. Lieberman said. "It took too long to happen, and there are many things here I disagree with, but the good far outweighs the bad. It's a very significant and critically important development for the security of the American people."
Senator 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.
"I guess there is a little paradox in it," Mr. Gramm said, in one of his last official remarks before his retirement. "I guess I would say two things give me solace. One, we're going to run this department better than we run the rest of the government, and we might learn something that could improve the rest of the government. And two, it is responding to a clear crisis where we had to respond."
Nonetheless, Republicans said many in their party were as angry as Democrats when they were forced to deal with last-minute provisions for business interests that House Republican leaders inserted in the bill late last week, without bothering to tell Senate Republicans. Senator Lincoln D. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, said that when he entered a closed meeting of the party's caucus in the Capitol this morning, the entire caucus was incensed about the provisions. He and several other moderate Republicans were considering joining the Democrats and voting to delete the measures, which would have delayed final approval by weeks or months by sending the matter to a conference with the House.
"It was a complete cacophony," Mr. Chafee said. "Almost every senator was outraged about the Texas A&M clause, and some of the others. It was a question for me of how arrogant we were going to be after we have the White House and both houses of Congress. Do we just assume that might makes right and anything goes?"
Faced with the strong possibility that the bill would not be approved today, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, scrambled to quell the rebellion by promising his caucus to undo what they considered to be the three most egregious House provisions. When Mr. Chafee and others asked for a similar promise from the House, Mr. Lott tracked down Speaker J. Dennis Hastert in Turkey, along with the incoming House majority leader, Tom DeLay, and extracted their promises to do the same.
On the major vote over stripping the provisions, only one Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, voted to do so, and three Democrats broke with their party and voted no: Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, Zell Miller of Georgia, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Ms. Landrieu is in a tight re-election race, and her vote means that Republicans cannot use the issue against her as they did other Democratic senators.
The interim senator from Minnesota, Dean Barkley, also voted with the Republicans to keep the business provisions in the bill. He later acknowledged that he received a welfare waiver for his state from the administration after he agreed to support the bill. The waiver of federal requirements could save Minnesota millions of dollars in fines.
"It's not that my vote was tied to the waiver," Mr. Barkley said in an interview. "I had already decided to vote that way. But obviously if I could use my new popularity to move something for the state of Minnesota, I'd be remiss not to do it."
Mr. Daschle questioned whether the Republicans were serious about removing the provisions next year.
"We've heard promises like that before," he said. "And I have to say, if they are so bad, why didn't they take them out now, you know? Why wait? I think it's always harder to take things out than to put them in, and it will get even harder as we go into the next Congress. So I'm very dubious."
The Senate also approved a resolution late today to keep the government running at current spending levels until Jan. 11, matching a similar measure approved in the House after members failed to pass regular spending bills. But Democrats said the resolution shortchanged the new department on many of its new functions.
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