Frist may shelve intelligence bill for second year in row

RAW STORY
Published: Friday September 29, 2006

Congressional Quarterly reports that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) will not allow a key intelligence bill to be brough to the Senate floor and, according to senior leadership aides, "may shelve the measure entirely."

Writer Tim Starks at CQ describes the intelligence authorization bill as "a potential Pandora’s box for Republicans in the run-up to the November midterm elections," given the perception that Senate Democrats would use such a bill to hammer President Bush's Iraq war policies. "Frist does not want to give them the platform to do so," writes Starks, "because he considers a rehash of the war to be a waste of the Senate's time."

A second failed year for the bill would "neuter the Intelligence panels," the article states, meaning in essence that Congressional committees would be unable to provide strategic guidance to the US intelligence community.

Excerpts from the subscription-only article follow...

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Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, wary of giving Democrats an opportunity to revisit contentious issues relating to the Iraq War, is not going to bring an intelligence authorization bill to the floor this month and may shelve the measure entirely, senior leadership aides say.
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If the bill does not come to the floor before the end of the year — a possibility that looks increasingly likely — it would mark the second year in a row that the Republicans have shied away from completing the legislation after an unbroken skein that began in 1978.
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Last year, according to Democrats, a Senate Republican put an anonymous hold on the fiscal 2006 measure (S 1803) in order to block Democratic amendments dealing with prewar Iraq intelligence and the detention of terror suspects.
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"It is absolutely stunning not to pass an intelligence authorization bill — the committee’s blueprint for the entire intel community — for two years in a row," said John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat. Without such a bill, he said, "the Intelligence committees have no ability to put their imprint on intelligence activities, and certainly no mechanism for enforcing it."

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