The hearings were dominated by two Democratic Party commissioners: Former Clinton Dep. Attorney General Jamie Gorlick, who did her best to cover up for Clinton-era mistakes (including her own); and longtime party lawyer Richard Ben Veniste, who made the prosecutors case against George W. Bush and his appointees.

 The morning the commission's recommendations were released the rush to passage began. Within two hours of its release Sen. John Kerry announced that he supported every provision and that Congress should enact it in the remaining months of the current congressional session. Neither he nor his advisors had a chance to even read, let alone think about, the 500-page report. But his endorsement was politically, not substantively, motivated.

 Virtually every Democrat immediately followed suit. And soon, most Republicans fell in line and called for its unconsidered passage. They were all afraid of an angry electorate come Nov. 2. There were few profiles in courage last summer east of the Potomac.

 Then the co-chairmen and a few of the commissioners -- their swelling egos pulsating with new life -- declared that they would not rest until final passage of a bill that faithfully included every detail of their delivered wisdom.

 Since then the deceptively mild-mannered co-chairmen, Democrat Lee Hamilton and Republican Gov. Thomas Kean, and the openly robust commissioner, former Senator Bob Kerrey -- snatched from their recent obscurity -- have flooded the airways and editorial pages campaigning for immediate passage without changing a comma of the version of the bill they endorsed.

 President Bush had appeared to be conspicuously unenthusiastic about the bill as supported by the Senate. The Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed it. Conservatives concerned about effective war fighting and controlling our borders were strongly against it -- and for good reason.

 As House Armed Services Committee Chairman Hunter has powerfully pointed out, the bill would take operational control of needed battlefield intelligence away from the Pentagon and give it to the new intelligence czar. It seems surpassingly odd that we would take control away from the Pentagon, which has been performing superbly for years and give it to the Intelligence agency that has been failing catastrophically for decades.

 Likewise, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Sensenbrenner is being nastily opposed for calling for tougher driver's license and political asylum standards to make it harder on possible terrorists. Ironically, the driver's license provision was in the 9/11 commission's final report (page 390), but was deemed too controversial for open border-favoring politicians of both parties.

 The president, having weakly endorsed the bill, is now being successfully pressured to overwhelm Chairmen Hunter and Sensenbrenner by his personal intervention. It appears he will do just that.

 So, a crass Democratic Party strategy for scoring election year political points on President Bush, yielded to out of political expediency and against the better judgment of the president and most of his party men, is about to become bad law.

 It is melancholy to consider that at a time of great national danger the first major intelligence reform in a half a century was conceived in political sin and is being born in weakness and pain. It is not an auspicious birth.