WASHINGTON — Eager to get an intelligence reform bill through Congress before the Nov. 2 elections, the White House is pressing to get controversial immigration provisions stripped from the House measure, Republican lawmakers said Tuesday.
Both the House and Senate are moving toward final votes this week on differing versions of bills that seek to overhaul the nation's intelligence community by putting a single director in charge of all 15 agencies. Both major parties are eager to take credit for completing the most sweeping intelligence changes since the Cold War.
The more comprehensive House version includes provisions to tighten border controls and make it easier for law enforcement to track and quickly deport suspected terrorists.
Democrats have joined civil libertarians, members of the Sept. 11 commission and families of victims of those attacks in criticizing the measures. Democrats describe the provisions as "poison pills" that threaten the chances for reconciling the two chambers' bills.
House Republicans said Tuesday that they believed the White House was fearful of a backlash against the House bill by immigrant voters.
"I sincerely hope that the White House is not seriously thinking about walking away from this effort in the interest of political expediency in a few states," said Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo).
Tancredo, chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, said in interviews that their staffs had been told by the House leadership that the White House wanted the immigration provisions removed from the bill. Both men said they urged the leadership to resist the pressure.
The White House, according to King and Tancredo, has specifically targeted provisions in the House bill that would make it easier to deport illegal immigrants , make it harder to use foreign consular identity cards as forms of identity in the United States and make it harder for illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses by imposing federal standards.
The American Civil Liberties Union has denounced those measures as "anti-immigrant policies" it says would "deny immigrants basic judicial review over unfair, arbitrary or otherwise abusive deportations" and allow suspected terrorists to be deported to countries "lacking a functioning government."
