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GOP opposition stymies Senate intelligence panel’s bill |
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By Helen Fessenden
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Posted: 04/23/07 09:19 PM [ET] |
An authorization bill that would have significantly expanded the powers of the Senate Intelligence Committee and declassified the total intelligence budget is now dead, following two failed attempts last week by Democrats to end debate and bring the bill to a vote.
As a result, the Democrats on the intelligence panel may have to lower their ambitions for the next round, the fiscal 2008 intelligence reauthorization bill, to stave off the threat of GOP objections and a possible White House veto. Members and staff in both parties said that yet another failure to bring the bill to the floor would seriously weaken the committee’s power, since the annual reauthorization measure has long been considered “must-pass” legislation. It is slated for markup in May, aides said.
But last week’s procedural maneuvering suggests that the sizable block of Senate Republicans who share the White House’s objections to the bill will again try to defeat the fiscal 2008 measure if it resembles anything like the fiscal 2007 bill.
“We will have to start from scratch,” one Democratic aide said. “I don’t know how many of these issues we’ll take on with the next bill.”
The fiscal 2007 bill cleared the intelligence panel unanimously last year, but it included several contested Democratic amendments that the panel passed only with the support of moderate Republicans Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine). That bill never came to the floor due to a GOP senator’s anonymous hold.
The fiscal 2006 bill also failed to get a floor vote due to a hold, marking the first time that the Senate failed to consider the reauthorization bill, which outlines the classified budget for the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, estimated to be about $44 billion.
Under new Democratic leadership, the panel passed the 2007 legislation again last January, this time by a 12–3 vote. But a hold by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blocked floor action until last week, when Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted to file cloture in a final push before beginning work on the 2008 measure. On April 16 and 17, both motions to end debate failed along party lines, 41–40 and 50–45. Hagel and Snowe were the only GOP defections.
Republicans said they opposed ending debate because Democrats did not allow a vote on numerous GOP amendments, while Democrats countered that almost all of the Republican amendments had little or nothing to do with intelligence.
In its declassified report language, the fiscal 2007 bill outlined a slew of measures —including those supported by Hagel and Snowe — that effectively would have marked the biggest expansion of the committee’s powers since 1991, when a Democratic-controlled Congress tightened oversight regarding covert activities in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal.
One of its most controversial provisions was a stipulation that each committee member, not just the panel’s chairman and vice-chairman and congressional leaders, be notified of intelligence activities and covert actions reported to Congress. If the intelligence community declined to notify all members, it had to explain its decision in a summary.
The bill also would have declassified the intelligence budget total; created an inspector general position with purview over the entire intelligence community; mandated a timely response by intelligence agencies to congressional requests for information and documents; and required the intelligence panel to confirm the heads of the three largest intelligence-collection agencies in the Pentagon: the National Reconnaissance Agency, the National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In addition, it stated that the intelligence agencies could only spend funds for intelligence activities that the committee had authorized and about which it had been informed.
Along with boosting the panel’s powers, the bill required two classified reports from the director of national intelligence: one on compliance with the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, the other on the CIA’s secret prisons abroad and whether any are still in use.
The White House vigorously opposed these provisions and issued a statement of administration policy on April 12 warning of a veto threat. The panel’s leaders then agreed on a manager’s amendment to address some of those concerns, but most of the core provisions remained intact.
One Republican committee member who objected to the bill was Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who authored three amendments that would have undone the provisions on committee notification and budget declassification. He filed the amendments but did not offer them because Democrats prevented him, according to spokeswoman Lindsay Mabry. But Democratic aides say no one prevented Chambliss from offering the amendments because all three were germane, unlike most of the other GOP amendments.
“There was no request for any vote with respect to his amendments,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley said.
“I’m surprised those amendments weren’t offered. They wouldn’t have passed anyway,” a GOP aide said.
Tensions between the panel’s leaders also frayed during the stalled floor action last week, indicating that compromise may be more difficult in the future. After the first failed cloture vote, Rockefeller said he was “furious, double-crossed, misled, minimized” by what he saw as a White House attempt to use the GOP minority to block the bill. For his part, Vice Chairman Kit Bond (R-Mo.) blamed Democratic leaders for not allowing “a fair discussion of this important bill.”
Added Bond: “I wanted to pass the 2007 Intelligence Authorization bill, but not at any cost.”
The GOP aide warned that another failed bill would further erode the power of the committee. Most of the money for the spy agencies is channeled through secret accounts in the defense appropriations bill. Intelligence Committee members have long sought to have more clout over final decisions on funding.
“The power is already tilted toward the appropriators, and it gets worse every year we don’t pass a bill,” the aide said. |
