The House could vote as early as Wednesday on a revised defense authorization bill, with new language that would give the president authority to grant the Iraqi government immunity from the crimes of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

After the House acted late Tuesday to refer the vetoed version of the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill (HR 1585) back to the Armed Services Committee, House leaders are now turning their attention to passing a new version of the bill as quickly as possible.

Democrat Ike Skelton of Missouri, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said the House aims to pass a new defense bill Wednesday under suspension of the rules. It will be a mirror image of the old bill but with changes to the provision that led to President Bush’s veto.

Skelton said he was still angry that Bush had bowed to the Iraqi government’s concerns about possible legal claims arising from the original bill.

“Why do you think he vetoed it? He did it because Iraq was coming out of its gourd,” Skelton said.

Although the final language was still being crafted late Tuesday evening, negotiators had settled on a fix for the bill. It would meet Bush’s request for broad waiver authority to exempt the current Iraqi government from provisions that give plaintiffs wider latitude to sue foreign governments on the State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism, according to several aides. Iraq had been on the list when Saddam ruled the country.

Democrats had hoped for a more limited fix to the bill in which only some $25 billion worth of Iraqi government funds held in the United States would be protected from being frozen during litigation.

The new version of the bill will include language expressing the sense of Congress that the State Department should work directly with the Iraqi government to find some relief for the victims of the former regime, including American prisoners of war from the 1990-91 Gulf War, Skelton said.

Not all Democrats were happy with the fix. Armed Services member Solomon P. Ortiz, D-Texas, said the committee would re-examine the issue this year as the fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill is formed.

“We need to get the bill passed now, and then later on we’ll look at it again,” Ortiz said.

The fix to the bill also will reimburse military personnel for the remainder of their 3.5 percent pay raise, retroactive to Jan. 1, 2008. Without the authorization bill, military personnel only received the standard 3 percent raise.

Bonuses for Defense Department employees, veterans’ health care and new military construction projects are on hold until the bill is cleared again and signed. A spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee said that virtually all of those issues would be addressed when the new bill becomes law.

By sending the original bill back to the committee, House leaders have established for the record that they regard the president’s December action as a regular veto, not a pocket veto as Bush had claimed.

The action also inoculates Democrats from the criticism that they were holding up an important military policy bill.

Republican Conference Chairman Adam H. Putnam of Florida said a protracted debate over the pocket veto would only delay the bill unnecessarily.

“We could either have an esoteric ­process fight about whether it’s a pocket veto . . . or we could pass a simple fix,” Putnam said.

But the Democrats’ action also let Republicans escape from declaring whether they supported the institutional position that a pocket veto in between two sessions of Congress was invalid.

“I hope we can avoid that debate,” said Minority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., adding that if the issue comes up in subsequent sessions of Congress, perhaps with a Democratic president, he would lean toward siding with the legislative branch.

The Senate is expected to take up the new defense authorization bill shortly after it returns next week.