Democrats Expected to Support Homeland Security
By Andrew Kosow
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2002–Both Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) were expected to vote for the Republican version of the homeland security bill that was expected to pass the Senate late Tuesday or Wednesday.
“Almost 100 percent of the bill was exactly like the legislation some of us drafted,” Lieberman said Tuesday on CNN, explaining why he would vote for a bill that includes key provisions he has vocally opposed.
“Many good things are still in this bill from the original Lieberman document,” Dodd said late Tuesday on the Senate floor. “That is why I support this bill.”
In what will be the largest reorganization of the federal government in a half-century, the new Department of Homeland Security would encompass 22 existing government agencies with approximately 170,000 federal workers.
As chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, Lieberman first crafted the legislation to create a Department of Homeland Security, but his version and the Republican version could not be reconciled.
Both sides have said the most contentious issue was the Bush administration’s insistence on changing federal union protections. President Bush said the protections constrained his ability to protect the country during a national crisis.
The Democrats vehemently opposed Bush’s approach and refused to allow a vote. Lieberman, speaking on the Senate floor earlier this fall during the debate over workers’ rights, said that if union protections were removed, “we may as well not have a Department of Homeland Security at all.”
The Democrats’ defeat in the Nov. 5 elections – which many attribute to the perception that Democrats were obstructing the passage of this bill – all but assured that the Republican version would pass in January. The Democrats then relented and allowed a vote in the lame-duck session.
Those union protections were significantly watered down in the bill before the Senate.
A Congressional Quarterly analysis of the labor provisions reads, “It would give the president the ability to exempt some employees from collective bargaining units for national security reasons. It also would give the department the ability to make changes to personnel rules but would establish a process for unions to object to and negotiate on those changes.”
When asked on CNN if he regretted his defense of union members’ rights, Lieberman said, “You never regret when you do the right thing.”
There are some provisions in the House version that Democrats said were sneaked in as a sop to Republican supporters, but they were assured by the Senate Republican leadership that much of it would later be “scrubbed from the legislation,” as Dodd put it on the Senate floor while explaining his support of the bill.
The Republican-controlled House passed the legislation, 299 to 121, earlier this month.
During that debate, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) – who has held nearly 40 hearings and briefings as chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security – said, “We need to reorganize our government to be able to implement our new strategy and confront the new terrorist threat facing this nation and the world. We need to wake up and do it now.”
Published in The Hour, in Connecticut.
