"I fear the Senate Democrats are fiddling while Rome has the potential to burn," Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said Tuesday.
"It's being talked to death," added White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
The main senator behind the delay is West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman and self-appointed guardian of congressional prerogatives.
Byrd has talked for hours over three days on the Senate floor about the need for careful, deliberate examination of President Bush's proposal to merge 22 federal agencies into a massive, 170,000-employee Homeland Security Department.
"Congress must never act recklessly," Byrd said. "My concerns are based in the Constitution."
Despite Byroad's oratory, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., insisted Democrats were not stalling. Daschle offered a motion Tuesday that would cut off debate on the Democratic version of the homeland security bill, provided at least 60 of the 100 senators agree when the matter comes to a vote Thursday.
"Let me simply say to the president or anybody else who has questions, there is no desire to slow this legislation down," Daschle said. "We've got to move the bill along."
Later Tuesday, the Senate did approve by voice vote an amendment by Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., which removes from the Democratic bill a powerful new White House anti-terrorism office that Bush viewed as an unwarranted congressional intrusion. Byrd's talkathon was aimed in part at preventing that amendment from gaining a final vote last week.
Yet Republicans were unlikely to agree to halt debate, because the Democratic bill does not give Bush the broad employee management powers he insists are crucial in the new agency to meet nimble, emerging terrorist threats. Democrats and their labor union allies contend that Bush wants to gut hard-won civil service and union protections.
Bush, who has threatened to veto the bill without the employee powers, said at a fund-raiser in Nashville, Tenn., that opponents are "more interested in Washington special interests than they are in protecting the interests of the American people."
Daschle, however, said Democrats would not back down.
"This is basically a question of accountability and ensuring that we never go back to the politicization of the federal work force that we saw in the bad old days," Daschle said. "No one can argue that homeland security requires the elimination of those protections."
There were efforts to bridge the gap on worker rights. One proposal being floated by Sens. Zell Miller, D-Ga., and Phil Gramm, R-Texas, would give the president more limited management flexibility over civil service employees and would place some restrictions on the president's ability to waive union protections for reasons of national security.
Two moderate Democrats, John Breaux of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, have circulated a proposal that would give union members appeal rights if the president invokes the national security waiver, but Republicans are opposed.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chief sponsor of the Democratic bill, said the White House must show some willingness to compromise on the worker issues if the overall measure is to pass.
"The rest of us have moved in a spirit of wanting to get this bill done, but still protecting the rights of federal employees, and I wish there'd be a little bit of movement on the White House part," said Lieberman, D-Conn.
Bush, however, left little doubt about his position.
"I will not accept a lousy bill," he said.
Copyright 2002. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
