As lawmakers bickered over the memorial service and the contempt resolution, a major standoff developed between the White House and Congress over the imminent expiration of a temporary law passed in August granting intelligence officers expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign and domestic intelligence targets without a warrant.

Bush raised the rhetorical stakes Thursday by threatening to delay a long-scheduled tour of Africa to give House Democrats an incentive to quickly adopt intelligence surveillance legislation the Senate passed earlier this week.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the Senate legislation is unacceptable because it grants immunity from lawsuits to telephone companies that shared private records with government officials. Pelosi said the legislation should also make clear that the administration’s authority to eavesdrop relies entirely on legislative statute and not on any executive powers granted to the president under the Constitution.

Pelosi told reporters Thursday that she would allow the intelligence community’s broader surveillance authority to lapse, forcing its members to obtain warrants from the special court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) until the House and Senate can reach agreement on a reauthorization bill.

Democrats say that Senate Republicans deliberately slowed the passage of intelligence legislation in that chamber to put House leaders in a tight spot of having to either accept the Senate version or allow surveillance authorization to lapse.

The Republican strategy seems almost to have worked. Democratic leaders were in position to take up the Senate bill Thursday after they passed a rule Wednesday evening to allow them to vote on “any bill related to foreign intelligence.”

But their spines stiffened overnight. On Thursday, House Democrats claimed that allowing the authorization to lapse for a few weeks would pose no danger to the American people, bracing themselves for an expected onslaught of Republican accusations that Congress is imperiling national security.

“President Bush has nothing to offer but fear,” said Pelosi.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Bush urging him to stop playing politics with national security.

“I take strong offense to your suggestion in recent days that the country will be vulnerable to terrorist attack unless Congress immediately enacts [the Senate] legislation,” said Reyes.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) offered his own tough words.

“I regret your reckless attempt to manufacture a crisis over the reauthorization of foreign surveillance laws,” Reid wrote in a letter dated Thursday. “Instead of needlessly frightening the country, you should work with Congress in a calm, constructive way to provide our intelligence professionals with all needed tools while respecting the privacy of law-abiding Americans.”

Democrats say that it will impose little hardship on intelligence officials to seek court warrants to intercept communications of foreign targets because there is no backlog at the FISA court.

Furthermore, they argue that while the Protect America Act expires at the end of this week, investigations begun under its auspices may continue for up to a year.  

To bolster their claims, Democrats have pointed to recent comments by Richard Clarke, Bush’s former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

“Simply put, it was wrong for the president to suggest that warrants issued in compliance with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] would suddenly evaporate with congressional inaction. Instead — even though Congress extended the Protect America Act by two weeks — he is using the existence of the sunset provision to cast his political opponents in a negative light,” Clarke wrote in a commentary piece.