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View Full Version : Pres & Congress go at it



Steve Savicki
08-03-2007, 05:07 PM
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20108672/

President Bush said Friday that Congress must stay in session until it approves legislation modernizing a U.S. law governing eavesdropping on foreigners.

“So far the Democrats in Congress have not drafted a bill I can sign,” Bush said at FBI headquarters, where he was meeting with counterterror and homeland security officials. “We’ve worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short.”

The president said lawmakers cannot leave for their August recess this weekend as planned unless they “pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States.”

Bush has the authority under the Constitution to call Congress back into session once it has recessed or adjourned, but White House spokeswoman Dana Perrino said talk of him doing that is premature.

“We cannot imagine that Congress would leave without fixing the problem,” she said.

As of early afternoon, however, it was clear that no deal was imminent.

“It’s up in the air; I think we’re going to be here for a while,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said upon emerging from a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats on the issue.

'It's the bare minimum'
Earlier Friday, the White House offered an eleventh-hour accord to Democrats in the negotiations over the matter, saying it would agree to a court review of its foreign intelligence activities instead of leaving certification up to the attorney general and director of national intelligence.

But it attached several conditions that could be unacceptable to Democrats: that the review would only be after-the-fact and would only involve the administration’s general process of collecting the intelligence, not individual cases, said a senior administration official speaking on condition of anonymity to more freely discuss internal deliberations.

Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said other issues in the dispute include whether the new eavesdropping powers Bush wants be made permanent — or temporary — and whether this new authority could be used against intelligence targets other than al-Qaida terrorists, such as Iran or Syria.

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Some "team" does NOT look like they're prepared.
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Someone looks lost.