(The following article by Eric Lipton was posted on the New York Times website on September 14.)
WASHINGTON — Congress is scrambling to pass long-delayed domestic and border security bills, as Republicans and the Democrats try to control the issues ahead of the midterm elections — and to blame each other for blocking progress.
The most far-reaching action on Thursday was in the Senate, which voted, 98 to 0, to approve a six-year port security package costing more than $5 billion that includes deadlines to install radiation detectors at the largest ports and encourages shippers and ports worldwide to improve guarding containers against stowaway weapons.
Earlier, the House approved, 283 to 138, a bill that calls for a two-layer fence along 700 miles of the border with Mexico, a measure advertised as an immigration enforcement and antiterror initiative.
Negotiations were under way on measures to tighten security at chemical plants and revamp the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The Senate port bill included language for mass transit and rail security programs, including random passenger and baggage screening at certain stations and fire-safety improvements for Amtrak tunnels in the Northeast corridor.
With just two weeks before Congress plans to begin its election recess, the debate has been intensely partisan. Democrats have tried to force Republicans to consider expansions that could add billions of dollars in costs in the port security bill by adopting, for example, all the outstanding recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission.
“Let’s see if they vote against this,” Senator Henry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the minority leader, said this week.
Republicans have generally succeeded in blocking such last-minute amendments, after condemning them as not-so-subtle efforts to kill or delay the bills.
“This is politics at its very worst,” Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said on the floor Thursday. “If Democrats spend half as much time fighting terrorists as they do this administration, America would win this war a lot faster.”
Democrats say it is the Republicans who are to blame for the delay.
“It is not about us,’’ Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said. “It is about the president of the United States and this Republican Congress, and is our country as safe as it could be. Republicans are in charge of everything.”
The Senate port bill, which the Bush administration supports and which is similar to a measure that the House has passed, would require installing radiation detection equipment by the end of 2007 at 22 ports that receive 98 percent of the incoming cargo, a goal that the Homeland Security Department has set.
It also writes into law two programs to give accelerated clearance to cargo from ports that pre-screen containers for weapons or containers shipped on behalf of companies that have agreed to assure their security from the factory until they being loaded onto ships.
The bill would authorize $5.5 billion for port security over six years, including adding 1,000 customs and border officers and $400 million in port security grants. It would also authorize $1.2 billion for rail security and $2.4 billion in grants for security on mass transit.
The bill would extend some port user fees to pay some of the costs, but it remains unclear whether Congress will appropriate enough money to finance the rest or whether the fees will be set aside for security.
The fence proposal represents a last-minute push by Republicans for at least part of their border security agenda. A similar requirement was included in December in broader immigration measures in the House. That bill stalled after a dispute with the Senate over a temporary-worker program to let some illegal immigrants remain here.
House Republicans also promised on Thursday to increase the number of Border Patrol agents, increase prosecutions of smugglers of immigrants and criminalize the building of tunnels under the border.
More than 60 Democrats joined with Republican House members to vote for the fence bill. Other Democrats in the House and Senate ridiculed it, saying that the fence alone would not solve the border problem and that the bill did not provide the more that $2 billion that it would cost to build.
Republican leaders are hoping to insert language into the larger budget bill for domestic security that is in a conference committee to address chemical plant security, FEMA restructuring and, perhaps, additional provisions.
The rules on chemical plants have support of the administration as well as Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The negotiations are trying to compromise on how demanding they should be.
A proposal backed by Republicans and opposed by environmentalists would let the owners of chemical plants decide what safety measures to adopt. It would prohibit the federal government from mandating that they consider using inherently safer chemicals.