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92 chapter eleven High Ransom “Denny Hastert hated this idea from the beginning, ”said one former congressional staffer. The Speaker himself recalled his feeling at the time was that the Commission was just“going to create a bigger bureaucracy.”1 Although pressed by the White House to move a bill, Speaker Hastert saw Rumsfeld’s hesitation and knew something wasn’t right. Hastert remembered telling the White House,“If there is no unanimity on your side, why should we walk the plank on this thing?”2 Tom DeLay’s view was that “no one cares about this bill except the 9/11 Commission, the Democrats, and the New York Times. ”But in the months before the 2004 election, it was dangerous to be seen as dismissive of the Commission and its recommendations. While they considered the Commission to be dominated by Democrats and the family groups to be partisan,scuttling legislation to enact the Commission’s recommendations was not politically feasible.“Never declare a corpse before an election,” said one staffer. With a decision to initiate a legislative process for the sake of electoral prudence, DeLay’s attitude became: “Take everything remotely related to security we’ve ever wanted and stuff it in the bill, either to kill the bill or to get it all; the sky’s the limit.”3 The House committees welcomed this view, rejecting suggestions that their legislative approach should be limited to the four corners of the 9/11 Commission Report. They would not roll over and rubber-stamp the Commission’s ideas. The House considered Senator Frist’s decision to “disenfranchise” the committees with national security expertise to be irresponsible and charged all its committees with national security within their purview to produce legislation. They called it a“comprehensive approach”to terrorism. The leadership called their committees back to Washington from the August recess to hold hearings.Thereafter,the High Ransom 93 leadership staff would orchestrate the simultaneous production of legislation from thirteen different committees and meld it into a comprehensive bill to be put before the House for a vote as soon as possible. Some saw this as a rope-a-dope strategy. The House would pass a bill creating a DNI and an NCTC before the elections to fend off charges they had ignored the recommendations of the popular 9/11 Commission, but it would be on their terms. The bill would be made more palatable by marrying it with other legislative priorities, especially the toughening of immigration restrictions that terrorists might exploit, and specifically a provision to make legal status in the United States a prerequisite to getting a driver’s license. In negotiations with the Senate, the House would hold out the prospect of a deal, but only at the high price of Senate acceptance of House provisions to restrict immigration, and only if Duncan Hunter was satisfied that the equities of the Defense Department were protected. The Speaker thought the process needed to play out; if the Senate could not meet its price, the House would be content to run a four-corners offense and run out the clock. Still,there was resistance to acting at all.“Why are we even doing this?”said one.Some within the House perceived the White House as reaching into the House leadership to appeal for action on the grounds that the Commission had made Republicans politically vulnerable and to deny Senator Kerry an issue against the president. These skeptics believed their leadership and the White House were fundamentally misreading the electoral import of the issue. Citing the virtues of a rigorous congressional committee process that produces legislation only after exhaustive and thorough analysis, they resented what they thought was the general Bush White House congressional strategy, aided and abetted by the House leadership: ram through legislation with speed.The House Republicans had similarly grumbled about having to pass President Bush’s education-reform proposal when they saw the Department of Education as a hindrance to the local control of schools. But to them,the most egregious example of legislative haste was the passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002. The president’s staff, from a series of meetings in the bunker of the White House, had devised a legislative proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security in absolute secrecy. The legislation was then sprung on Congress in a presidential address to the nation, and the House was force-marched into passage seven weeks later. The intelligence reform legislation, coming at...

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