Congress Fails to Pass Intelligence Reform; Tax Snooping Clause Hidden in Appropriations Bill
LOU DOBBS, HOST: Tonight, what in the world is Congress thinking? The entire Intelligence Reform Bill blown up because the Senate wants illegal aliens to have driver's licenses.</s>REP. JIM SENSENBRENNER (R-WI), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: I don't like to vote for things on serious issues that might look good on a bumper sticker.</s>DOBBS: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner led the fight to include recommendations of the September 11 Commission to prevent illegal aliens from obtaining driver's licenses. Congressman Sensenbrenner and House Intelligence Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra will be here to talk about why the negotiations failed and why Congress is refusing to protect the American people. And I'll talk with Peter Gadiel, the president of the 9/11 Families for a Secure America. He lost his 23-year-old son on September 11. President Bush says he'll push ahead with plans to legalize millions of illegal aliens. Could it be President Fox and President Bush consider our southern border an inconvenience?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One out of every ten Mexicans lives in the United States.</s>DOBBS: And how should we reform our intelligence community? Do congressional reforms go far enough, or are they misguided? I'll be talking with Admiral Bobby Inman, former director of the National Security Agency, and former deputy director of the CIA.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is LOU DOBBS TONIGHT for Monday, November 22. Here now for an hour of news, debate and opinion is Lou Dobbs.</s>DOBBS: Good evening. Tonight, anger and defiance on Capitol Hill after Congress failed to pass a sweeping Intelligence Reform Bill. One of the main reasons: Congress' refusal to support a measure to bar illegal aliens from obtaining driver's licenses. Congress tonight also faces tough questions about the way in which it handled the massive new spending bill. An unelected House aide almost added a measure that would have allowed lawmakers to inspect the tax returns of every American. That measure was ultimately blocked by the Senate at the last minute. Tonight, Ed Henry reports on the battle over the Intelligence Reform Bill. Lisa Sylvester reports on the spending bill controversy. And Casey Wian reports on a battle still building, President Bush's proposals to give illegal aliens the right to live and work in this country. We begin with Ed Henry -- Ed.</s>ED HENRY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Lou. Vice President Cheney came up to the capitol today, huddled behind closed doors with Congressman James Sensenbrenner, trying to break this log jam on 9/11 reform, but that meeting ended, and there was yet another stalemate.</s>HENRY (voice-over): Congressman James Sensenbrenner, one of two Republicans to hold up the intelligence bill, says he's more determined than ever to block what he considers meaningless reform.</s>SENSENBRENNER: Well, I'm not going to cave.</s>HENRY: Sensenbrenner wants to ban states from giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. He says Senate negotiators are too scared to challenge powerful lobbyists who oppose the provision.</s>SENSENBRENNER: I don't like to vote for things on serious issues that might look good on a bumper sticker, but which I know have so many loopholes that they won't work.</s>HENRY: Not even President Bush calling from Chile on Friday night could stop Sensenbrenner. Observers say it's up to the president to face down fellow Republicans.</s>JOHN LEHMAN (R), FORMER 9/11 COMMISSIONER: The president now has been challenged directly by the leadership of the -- of the Congress and by the lobbyists and by the bureaucracy. Now he's got to show who's in charge.</s>HENRY: The other Republican who refused to be rolled was Congressman Duncan Hunter. Despite a call from Vice President Cheney, Hunter insisted on protecting the Pentagon from losing power to a new director of national intelligence.</s>REP. DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA), CHAIRMAN, ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: In my shop, having them maintaining the chain of command and -- and searching our people in uniform is paramount.</s>HENRY: Some believe the window of opportunity has closed. But top Republicans think they can salvage this after Thanksgiving.</s>SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), MAJORITY WHIP: The president's on the way back from South America, is going to lobby some more. I'm optimistic we're going to come back together December the 6th and 7th and pass this bill.</s>HENRY: Former 9/11 commissioners are warning of inaction.</s>TIM ROEMER (D), FORMER 9/11 COMMISSIONER: We saw intelligence failures, FBI mistakes, border patrol and visa problems leading up to 9/11, and we lost 3,000 people. How many more body bags are we going to need to see?</s>HENRY: James Sensenbrenner fired back that the 9/11 commissioners should not be satisfied with doing just half the job. He says he wants reform with teeth, not just window dressing. Sensenbrenner, in fact, points out that the -- the 19 hijackers were able to validly obtain 63 driver's licenses across the country. He says that's a problem he wants to fix. Sensenbrenner says he will stand on principle, even if it brings down the entire bill -- Lou.</s>DOBBS: Thank you very much, Ed Henry from Capitol Hill. And I'll be talking with Congressman Sensenbrenner in just a matter of moments. Lawmakers tonight are also tackling the consequences of an astonishing attempt by a House staff aide to give Congress the right to inspect your tax returns. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he has no idea how that proposal was added to the spending bill. Not surprisingly, that raises considerable doubt about the entire legislative process operating on Capitol Hill now. Lisa Sylvester reports from Washington.</s>LISA SYLVESTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Buried in the 14-pound spending bill on page 1102, section 222, was an item missed by House members but caught by Senate staffers, a provision that would have allowed the Senate and House appropriations committees to peek at anyone's confidential taxpayer returns.</s>SEN. KENT CONRAD (D), NORTH DAKOTA: This would have provided unfettered power to chairmen of the appropriations committees, now and in the future to assign agents, to go review people's tax returns, and to reveal them to the public without any civil or criminal penalty.</s>SYLVESTER: Congress had to roll the appropriations bills of 13 government departments into one mammoth legislation, because it failed to pass individual appropriations bills during the term, and the session was nearing an end. Lawmakers were outraged they were given a bill that they only had a few hours to read.</s>REP. BRIAN BAIRD (D), WASHINGTON: Something is wrong with our democracy, my friends.</s>PAUL LIGHT, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Congress has become sloppier over the last 20 years in terms of its legislating. It's become less disciplined. It's become more polarized. The way you get things done up there, given the intense partisan opposition, is to do this kind of legislating.</s>SYLVESTER: The bill also contained a lot of pork: $25,000 to fund a mariachi music program in Nevada; almost $5 million to stabilize bath houses in Arkansas; $1.5 million for the Congressman Richard Gephardt archives at the Missouri Historical Society; $1.4 million to upgrade the international airport in appropriations chairman Ted Stevens' district; and $225,000 for the National Wild Turkey Federation.</s>TOM SCHATZ, CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT WASTE: The taxpayers have nothing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving because of all the pork in the omnibus appropriations bill that Congress has just enacted.</s>SYLVESTER: House Republicans plan to delete the tax return provision in a special session on Wednesday. And the president is expected to sign the bill after the provision is removed -- Lou.</s>DOBBS: Lisa, thank you. I am joined now by the congressman who blocked the House vote on the Intelligence Reform Bill over the issue of completing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Congressman James Sensenbrenner is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He is also a member of the homeland security committee and joins us tonight from Capitol Hill. Congressman, thank you for being with us.</s>SENSENBRENNER: Good evening, Lou. Glad to be here.</s>DOBBS: Congressman, the idea -- I referred to -- I'd like to start with a quote. Senator Rockefeller, referring to you and to congressman Duncan Hunter, if we could put that up for our viewers to see. "We've had, frankly, two obstructionists in the House. It's a matter of two individuals who are trying to stop it, the legislation to reform our intelligence community, for their own reasons. And it doesn't make sense." Senator Jay Rockefeller, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Congressman, what's your reaction?</s>SENSENBRENNER: Congressman Hunter and I are trying to do it right. And it's better to do it right than to do it at a half-baked manner that ends up coming back and endangering the American people. The 9/11 Commission itself recognized that there were problems in our driver's license system. The 19 hijackers got 63 validly issued driver's licenses. And you can bet they used them to get on the planes on September 11. We need tough national standards to make sure that people don't game the system, and that includes denying driver's licenses to illegal aliens who cannot prove their lawful presence in the United States.</s>DOBBS: Congressman, I think to most Americans, and if one looks at the most recent polling in this country, that makes absolute sense to most Americans. Yet you were described by, certainly, Senator Rockefeller and others in the Senate as an obstructionist. Why in the world would it not have been just a matter of great ease on the part of all the conferees to agree that this country will not issue documents to illegal aliens and to move ahead with the reform legislation?</s>SENSENBRENNER: Because the Senate was stubborn. The House passed a comprehensive package of law enforcement and immigration reforms, not just on the driver's license issue, when the bill was passed in early October. A conference committee was set up the second week of October. The senators refused to talk about the immigration and law-enforcement provisions in this bill until Tuesday of last week saying they were extraneous, they were too controversial, we ought to deal with them in separate legislations or study them.</s>DOBBS: Too controversial?</s>SENSENBRENNER: Yes.</s>DOBBS: Too controversial. I understand the president, Congressman, called you Friday night trying to get you to change your position, that, in point of fact, you were willing to do that, so long as you were given other considerations. What were those other considerations?</s>SENSENBRENNER: The other considerations were tightening up the law so that terrorists who had gotten into this country and were identified by our intelligence agencies could be detained and deported before they executed a terrorist act. And the president agreed that that was something that was necessary and was a legitimate tradeoff. He sent his chief legislative director in to talk to the senators, and they said no to that as well as no to denying illegal aliens driver's licenses.</s>DOBBS: Why in the world would they not agree to that?</s>SENSENBRENNER: You'll have to ask them. But these are the same senators who have been bitterly attacking Congressman Hunter and myself for standing up for some common-sense reforms that are needed to close the loop. What the senators are proposing to do is that we would have great intelligence, but, once we got the great intelligence, we wouldn't have the legal tools to use them to prevent terrorists from gaming our legal system and immigration laws to cover their potential terrorist attack in the country. It's like fumbling the ball on the 10-yard line. Hunter and I want to get the ball across the goal line to do it right.</s>DOBBS: To do it right. You think it is absolutely a fact that with 19 hijackers of September 11 having acquired 63 illegal driver's licenses, it seems that that should be the first line of defense in any reform of the intelligence community and Homeland Security.</s>SENSENBRENNER: Well, Lou, you're wrong on one respect. Those 63 driver's licenses were all validly issued by state DMVs across the country, and one of the things we wanted in our standards was some kind of a database link so you couldn't get a driver's license in northern Virginia and then get another driver's license when you went across the bridge to a DMV in Maryland or in</s>D.C. DOBBS: Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say thank you, sir.</s>SENSENBRENNER: You're welcome.</s>DOBBS: Later here, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, will join me to give us his perspective on the failure to pass the intelligence bill or perhaps, depending on your perspective, the success in not passing it. I'll also be talking with former National Security Agency director and former deputy director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman. And I'll be joined by Peter Gadiel, the father of the victim of the September 11 attacks. Still ahead, federal agents break up a massive fraud that gave thousands of illegal aliens documents, including driver's licenses. We'll have that report for you. President Bush and Mexican President Fox want millions of illegal aliens in this country legalized. Both presidents apparently think our border is something of an inconvenience. We'll have that report for you coming up next.