Voting on the Intelligence Bill

From Outside the Beltway comes this story: bq. The Senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday to revamp the structure of the nation's intelligence community by creating a national intelligence director, a counterterrorism center and other agencies in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The bill calls for the most dramatic changes to the intelligence community in half a century, and would give the new director authority to coordinate the activities and spending of the CIA and several other intelligence agencies throughout the government. It would also declassify the amount of money the government spends on intelligence and would create a civil liberties board to safeguard privacy and civil rights as the government steps up anti-terrorism activities. bq. The legislation, passed by a 96 to 2 vote, contains many of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. But a confrontation looms with the House, whose leaders have drafted a bill with many provisions not in the Senate measure. The vote underscores the influence of the 10-member commission that studied the government's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The panel's report, released in July, became a bestseller and spurred Congress and the White House to rethink an intelligence structure built mainly to address Cold War threats. "This is an historic vote and an historic day," the bill's chief sponsors, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), said in a statement. The vote was 96 to two. Hmmmm... We have 100 Senators so that means that two of them were missing. Wonder who they could be: Check out the U.S. Senate website for this particular bill - look at the E's and K's specifically...