Honeymoon over so soon?

I've got some good news and some - well, actually it's good news both ways.

The good news is that the bill acting on the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to "reform" the intelligence services is dead for the time being. Good first because the central idea, the big proposal to combine the services under centralized control, is a really bad one: A case can be made that the intelligence services, assuming you're going to have them because governments need information to function properly, need reorganization - but putting so much control in a centralized office only increases the potential for intelligence to be cherry-picked for political ends, since there would be only one voice. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the slight diversity of opinion, the varying shadings of doubt, were the only good things about the assessments. Under the new regime, even those shadings would disappear.

Good second because some of the other stuff added to the bill was just, well, bad. Bad as in stinky bad. Bad as in anti-civil liberties bad. Bad as in anti-privacy bad. Bad as in xenophobic bad.

Which brings us to the other good news: why the bill has stalled. From AP for Tuesday:

Defying President Bush, Reps. Duncan Hunter and James Sensenbrenner - who led opposition dooming legislation based on the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations - said they won't change their minds without Senate concessions.

Their joint opposition forced House Speaker Dennis Hastert to pull the bill. That is, the bill is stymied because House and Senate Republicans are banging heads. And it's a pleasing sound.

For Hunter, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, this is a turf battle. The Pentagon opposes the bill because it would lose its leading position in intelligence matters, and whatever limits the Pentagon's influence also limits that of Hunter's committee. So he'll resist it even if he has to resort to adopting DOD's ridiculous argument that the reorganization would result in soldiers' "being confused about the chain of command" - as if corporals and PFCs are going to be reading intelligence reports and struggling to decide it they conflict with orders from their commanders.

For House Judiciary Committee chair Sensenbrenner it's more anti-foreigner, as he refuses to yield to a demand from the Senate (and urging from Bush) to drop a provision changing asylum laws, which his paranoia claims are an open door for terrorists to enter the country.

What's fun about this is that it's already become personal.

"It'll be tougher now because the well got even more poisoned by the senators and their supporters thoroughly criticizing Duncan Hunter and myself by name on the talking head shows yesterday," Sensenbrenner told The Associated Press on Monday. ...

"It was tough to begin with. It will be even tougher after the Senate plus (GOP House Intelligence chairman Pete) Hoekstra had a press conference where they badmouthed Duncan Hunter and me, and everybody got on the talking head shows and pilloried Congressman Hunter and me," Sensenbrenner said.

So the Senate GOP leadership is pissed at the House GOP leadership, the House GOP leadership is pissed at the Senate GOP leadership, and Bush is probably pissed at both of them for not managing to come up with something he can parade around.

There was nothing left but recriminations on Monday, with most of Congress heading home for Thanksgiving and Bush still on an overseas trip. No meetings of the bill's negotiators have been planned.

Cool.

Footnote: Ex-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman told CNN

"[t]his is the classic confrontation you see in Washington that they can sell tickets for.... Because the president now has been challenged directly by the leadership of the Congress and by the lobbyists and by the bureaucracy. Now he's got to show who's in charge."

And I'm on the phone to Ticketmaster.