Senate stuck in slow motion on homeland security bill

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., filed a cloture motion Tuesday to end a protracted debate on homeland security legislation, but it is unclear whether he will be able to break the deadlock.

The White House deployed homeland security adviser Tom Ridge to Capitol Hill Tuesday to reiterate his call for speedy action on the homeland measure. "We need to get on with this," Ridge told reporters.

But it was considered unlikely that the Senate would heed the call. Just moments after Daschle filed for cloture, Republicans objected. Republican leadership aides held an impromptu news conference to accuse Daschle of employing Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to filibuster the bill to justify the cloture motion.

The Republicans said the procedural move would effectively force the Senate to vote on a Democratic-crafted bill that President Bush already has threatened to veto.

"I don't see any purpose to get a bill that can't be signed by the president," said one GOP aide.

The Republican resistance indicates that the GOP might stick together to block the cloture motion when it comes up Thursday as expected. Such a move would eat up even more time on the crowded legislative calendar.

The renewed partisan spat comes as two groups of senators ready separate measures that seek to bridge the party-line divide on the homeland bill's employment provisions.

Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and John Breaux, D-La., are working on a plan to let homeland security employees appeal presidential decisions to deny them union rights on national security grounds.

Meanwhile, Sens. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and Zell Miller, D-Ga., are preparing a provision that tracks the language the House adopted in August.

But even those moves, intended to bridge the divide between the parties, have drawn partisan fire.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer called the Nelson-Breaux plan a "nonstarter." Most Democrats dismissed the Gramm-Miller language.

Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., blasted the White House for refusing to compromise. "The White House hasn't moved at all-the rest of us have," he said. "We've got to find common ground."

Mark Wegner contributed to this report.