Bush Goes To The Mountain

President Bush, using Mount Rushmore as a patriotic stage set, insisted Thursday that the Senate approve a Homeland Security Department with no bureaucratic strings attached.

With Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, in the audience, Mr. Bush blasted the restrictions on his authority contained in the Senate version of the bill to establish the new security office.

"I don't want our hands tied so we cannot do the number one job you expect from us, which is to protect the homeland," said Mr. Bush, with the granite-carved heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt hovering overhead.

Daschle was not among those applauding as the president said the Senate bill wouldn't let him shift resources in a new department without a time-consuming approval process, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller.

"I'm a little worried about some of the noise I hear" about the shape of the bill in Congress, Mr. Bush said. "We need to be able to move resources."

The president wants to be able to hire, fire and transfer federal workers freely as he combines scores of federal agencies into one Cabinet-level entity. Democrats charge the president with picking an unnecessary fight over worker protections.

"I don't have that authority under the Senate bill," Mr. Bush said. "It is important in times of war to have flexibility. I need flexibility to be able to run this department."

An age of terrorism demands no less, he declared. Mr. Bush said America has a challenge in fighting terrorism, "and we are going to win that war."

Tom Ridge, Mr. Bush's director of homeland security, spoke before the president and said the structure of the new department must not be bound by "cumbersome" rules.

The president has not said whether he'll nominate the former Pennsylvania governor to be the first secretary of homeland security.

Mr. Bush has said in speech after speech that he wants broad leeway to assign and transfer personnel of the new department, at will, if necessary.

But one senior Senate Democrat, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, said the president is turning an urgent quest to improve the nation's internal security into a labor-management dispute.

The Mount Rushmore speech was the wrap-up of a two-day Midwest swing that has taken the president to a university campus in Milwaukee, the Iowa State Fair and fund-raisers for GOP gubernatorial candidates in Wisconsin and Iowa. He returned to Texas on Thursday afternoon to continue his vacation at his 1,600-acre ranch near Crawford.

In speeches throughout the week, Mr. Bush has portrayed Senate Democrats as unreliable on security issues, especially in connection with his decision to unify many protective functions in a single cabinet department.

Mr. Bush contends the Democrats are attempting to saddle him with "a big fat bureaucratic rule book" when they demand Civil Service and union protections for the new department's work force.

"The Senate looks a little shaky," he told a fairgrounds crowd in Des Moines, Iowa Wednesday. "They want to protect their turf. They want to protect the special interests."

Shortly after Mr. Bush spoke at the Iowa event, Lieberman appeared to promote his own presidential aspirations in 2004 and to raise questions about the White House stance on homeland security.

"I don't understand the tactic that President Bush is following," said Lieberman, asserting that the two sides agree on 90 percent of the issues on the table.

Lieberman said he is puzzled at Bush's effort to remove federal protections for federal workers who will be transferred to the new department.

In a private meeting before his speech, Mr. Bush addressed economic recovery issues with a group of South Dakota residents drawn largely from the agricultural community.

South Dakota has been hit by a long dry spell, and the president said: "I understand what drought means to people making a living off the land."

"We want to help deal with this drought," he said. "We want to help the hurting people."