The House passed a fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill on early Friday morning whose chances of getting to the president’s desk depend, for the third consecutive year, on whether the Senate can overcome partisan fights over the annual measure.

Once again, the House had comparatively little difficulty pushing through the annual bill to renew spy programs that has faltered recently on the other side of the Capitol, although a dustup over classified earmarks temporarily threatened to derail the measure (HR 2082). The legislation passed by a vote of 225-197.

Lawmakers adopted a major amendment to the legislation reaffirming that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, PL 95-511) should govern any domestic electronic surveillance used to collect foreign intelligence. The 245-178 vote to adopt the amendment, which was offered by Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., represented a setback for the Bush administration. It has recently renewed its lobbying effort to convince Congress to expand surveillance authority beyond FISA’s current boundaries.

The House also rejected by 185-230 a Republican bid to remove a provision of the bill requiring a study of climate change and its impact on national security.

The largely classified bill authorizes funds for the intelligence community, which has a budget estimated at around $44 billion or $45 billion. The legislation emphasizes funding for spy training, language proficiency programs, new analysts overseas and counterintelligence.

According to House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the bill is the largest intelligence authorization measure ever. In part, that is because the panel included in its authorization intelligence-related funding from President Bush’s fiscal 2008 supplemental funding request, an outline of which he submitted to Congress at the same time he proposed his base budget. The White House has consistently used supplemental spending bills, rather than the regular budget, to fund the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although the Bush administration opposes many of the House bill’s provisions, it has been even more opposed in recent years to the Senate version of the legislation.

In April, the White House threatened to veto a Senate fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill (S 372), citing several sections of the bill, including one to declassify the total of the intelligence budget. Republicans blocked consideration of that bill, and partisan feuding earlier prevented fiscal 2005 and fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bills from reaching the Senate floor. Senate Democrats and Republicans have squared off repeatedly over which amendments should be given consideration on the floor.

With the Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled to consider its fiscal 2008 authorization bill on May 17, it will have to decide whether to continue to press contentious proposals it has endorsed in the past or take what one panel aide described as a more “minimalist” approach in order to get a bill through the Senate.

“That’s the choice that the committee needs to make,” said the aide. “There’s still strong support for things like declassifying the [budget] topline that the administration is adamantly opposed to.”

Passage of the House bill was not without its difficulties.

Earlier Thursday, lawmakers refused to go into a secret session by a vote of 207-217 to discuss the details of classified earmarks in the legislation. Flake accused Democrats of withholding information in violation of new earmark guidelines. Democrats said they had followed procedures, but that a printing error had delayed their efforts to provide lawmakers with the required disclosure.

Although the Rules Committee voted May 9 to allow 10 of the 16 amendments filed to the largely classified measure, it turned away two addressing earmarks: One sponsored by Flake that would have barred earmarks in the classified portion of the legislation, and another sponsored by Mike Rogers, R-Mich., that targeted a project in the district of Rep. John P. Murtha, R-Pa., chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Rogers’ amendment would have required the Justice Department’s inspector general to audit the effectiveness of the National Drug Intelligence Center, located in Johnstown and repeatedly singled out for elimination by the president.

Republicans raised a point of order alleging that Democrats did not comply with House earmark rules, but Democrats turned aside the objection. During the fight, several Republican lawmakers shouted “Pennsylvania pork!” They offered a motion to recommit that was designed to shift the $23 million for the center to human intelligence, but it was defeated by a vote of 181-241.

The bill is the first intelligence authorization measure written under new rules for disclosing earmarked funds. The report on the bill lists earmarks for 26 projects requested by 11 lawmakers, totaling nearly $100 million.

The legislation would require an array of reports from the spy agencies, which the White House opposes. Some lawmakers wanted to mandate even more reports - or strip those already proposed from the bill.

One defeated amendment, offered by the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, would have deleted a requirement that the intelligence community produce a report on the national security ramifications of climate change. Democrats and Republicans fought bitterly over the requirement, with Republicans alleging that an assessment of global warming’s implications for national security would be a waste of intelligence resources and Democrats saying it was a valid study backed by several retired military leaders.

Rush D. Holt, D-N.J., offered an amendment, approved by voice vote, requiring the president to report to Congress on whether laws protecting the identities of covert agents should be enhanced. The amendment was inspired by the Valerie Plame case.

The House also adopted by 297-122 an amendment offered by Rogers and Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., capping the number of employees at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at current levels.

The growth of personnel within the DNI has led some lawmakers to warn about a cumbersome layer of bureaucracy.

As approved by the committee, the bill would prohibit the Defense secretary from terminating the U-2 spy aircraft program until he certifies that the department’s intelligence capabilities would not suffer during the transfer to the Global Hawk RQ-4 unmanned aerial vehicle.

It also would require quarterly reports from the administration on the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. And it would require an audit every three years by the CIA’s inspector general of agency covert actions, a reaction, the committee wrote in its report (H Rept 110-311), to the CIA’s failure to inform Congress of one covert action. The measure also requests reports to Congress on the number of intelligence contractors and whether they have been involved in waste or fraud, or are under investigation for such abuses.

Michael Teitelbaum contributed to this story.

First posted May 10, 2007 10:12 p.m.