On Sept. 30, anyone tuning in to CBS' "Face the Nation" would have seen newsman Bob Schieffer chatting with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the committee.

Careful observers might have noticed something else, too: a palpable sense of urgency.

Hatch was clearly worried about the pace of negotiations on the House side. "We've got to get this done," he said. "If we don't do it, we risk the whole country, or at least ... another incident that could cost the American people very, very dearly."

Members of the House Judiciary Committee and their staff missed the broadcast. They spent the weekend just as they had spent the previous week, in the committee's main meeting room.

It was here, in a grand space dominated by a three-tiered hardwood dais, that House members would iron out their version of the administration's bill, which would ultimately go head to head with a competing measure crafted by the Senate.

The Judiciary Committee is one of the most polarized in Congress. As if to remind the members of the panel's difficult past, the session took place below a portrait of Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), who chaired the committee three years earlier during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

On this weekend, the dais and its boardroom-style chairs were empty as casually dressed lawmakers, aides and representatives of the administration sat around a giant rectangular wooden table usually occupied by witnesses. The mood was informal but focused. Documents, pads, pens and Styrofoam coffee cups were scattered about.

"What we did as a committee was go through the (Justice Department) bill provision by provision to find out what is actually helpful and has some reasonable semblance of checks and balances," recalled Scott. "It was a lot of work, a lot of meetings, a lot of late nights."

"The atmosphere was tense, but collaborative," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat. The usually divided panel seemed inspired by the mission, she said, cobbling together legislation compromise by compromise. Even the Justice Department staffers in the room, she said, seemed swept up in the effort to get a bill everyone could support.

The bill these sessions would yield included provisions similar to those requested by Ashcroft and later accepted by the Senate, but with subtle changes in language intended to protect against overreaching by federal investigators.

For example, the administration wanted "one-stop shopping" for warrants and court orders that would apply nationwide; the House bill would have allowed such orders, but set restrictions on what judges could issue them.

In another instance, Ashcroft sought "roving wiretaps" to keep track of suspects who switched phones often; the House bill would have allowed them only with a special court finding.

By Oct. 4, the committee had wrapped up its prep work. The scattered papers and coffee cups had been removed, and committee members were back in their business clothes, seated at the dais.

For Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from the West Side of Manhattan who considered himself one of the staunchest civil libertarians in the room, what followed was pleasantly astonishing.

"There was real and honest debate on the amendments and some were accepted and some weren't and there were real votes and they weren't party-line votes," he said. "As we went though the amendments ... one by one we checked off my objections. And at the end of it, I didn't have any left. And to my surprise I found myself voting for the bill."

Committee members from both parties credited Sensenbrenner with allowing the compromise to take shape. At 58, the tall, stout Wisconsin millionaire had just inherited the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee the year before.

After just three hours, Sensenbrenner slammed his gavel down, signaling the adjournment of a most unusual meeting. The committee vote had been unanimous, 36-0. There were smiles, a smattering of applause and looks of delight.

"Any time you get unanimity on the Judiciary Committee it's like some foreign substance must have wafted into the room that has everybody in a trance," recalled Flake, the Arizona Republican.

***

As the House Judiciary Committee was moving toward unity on its bill, a Senate measure was taking shape in a more tightly controlled fashion during secret negotiations between Leahy, Hatch, Ashcroft and their respective staffs.

Leahy, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, took the lead. The tall, bald Grateful Dead fan, a liberal Democrat, is a longtime champion of civil liberties, and from the outset that he was torn between the demands of national security and personal privacy.

The Senate negotiations were pursued virtually round-the-clock between Sept. 19 and Oct. 4, as the parties sought to reconcile the administration's draft and a separate bill drawn up by Leahy's staff. The two measures had much in common, but an initial spirit of cooperation between Leahy and the administration faded quickly.

Beryl Howell, Leahy's lead negotiator, would later blame the shift in tone on Ashcroft's unwillingness to compromise.

"The administration was not interested in congressional deliberations, compromise, or stopping to discuss details," she wrote in the George Washington University Law Review. "Instead, it wanted legislation passed immediately."

Howell insists that Leahy did not bow to Ashcroft during the process. But while the negotiations on the Senate side did yield some modifications to Ashcroft's original proposals, the attorney general got virtually all of the powers he sought.

One sticking point during the negotiations involved the administration's demand for "sneak and peak" searches. Although such searches have long been allowed by courts in many jurisdictions across the country in organized crime and drug cases, the administration was seeking to embed the practice in federal statute.

The Ashcroft proposal called for courts to approve warrants for these searches when authorities could show that notifying the targets might result in "adverse results," including when notification would "seriously jeopardize an investigation." On these important points, the administration got what it wanted.

Still, Leahy did modify the provisions somewhat. The final version required an additional court finding to allow seizures of property, and it gave judges the power to limit the delay of notification on a case-by-case basis.

According to Howell, the bill was nearly finalized during marathon talks over the weekend of Sept. 29-30. But the deal unraveled when Ashcroft, during an Oct. 2 meeting with Leahy and Hatch, backed away from agreements his agents had made.

"The Justice Department and the White House basically were reopening some deals that had already been cooked and were done and on paper," she said in a recent interview. "Rather than crossing things off the list to negotiate, things had been added to the list."

After the session with Ashcroft, Leahy told his team to go back to the drawing table. While Leahy went about other business, Ashcroft and Hatch headed out to address a scrum of reporters at the Ohio Clock, an 8-foot-tall timepiece that stands just outside the Senate chamber.

"I'm deeply concerned about the rather slow pace at which we ... seem to be making this come true for America," Ashcroft said. "We need to be able to put tools in place that would help us disrupt or prevent any additional terrorist acts to which we might be susceptible."

Two days later, the Senate bill was completed. It met nearly all of Ashcroft's demands on surveillance, evidence-gathering, detention and information-sharing between law enforcement and intelligence agents.

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End Part II