Congress is back--and both houses already are moving on intelligence reform.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.)wasted no time informing his colleagues that security issues would "dominate" Senate business for the next four weeks. And House Majority Leader Tom DeLay ( R.-Tex.) announced an ambitious schedule for consideration of a comprehensive intelligence overhaul bill, complete with unprecedented "simultaneous" markups by all relevant committees in one week. Both DeLay and Frist are determined to send the President a bill that will exceed the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission--before Election Day.

These final weeks of the 108th Congress will be pivotal in setting the way we respond to terrorism.

Serious intelligence reform is long overdue. As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman and congressional leaders designed and implemented most of the architecture that future Presidents would use to confront, contain and prevail over the Soviet Union. This architecture emerged gradually and came to include NATO, the Marshall Plan, the "containment" doctrine, and a strong military. Now, three years after 9/11, President George W. Bush and his allies in Congress must assess whether the capabilities and institutions that won the Cold War are sufficient to prevail over the long term and against a very different enemy.

It won't be easy. As Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), noted during his passionate speech at the Republican convention, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman faced political adversaries who consciously chose not to politicize these decisions. President Bush, by contrast, faces critics in Congress and on the campaign trail who vigorously object to virtually all of his proposed initiatives, and seek to make political hay out of these differences.

In the Senate, Frist has assigned the task of bringing an intelligence reform bill to the Senate floor to Government Affairs Committee Chairman Susan Collins, R-Maine. Senate Democrats have let it be known that they regard the 41 recommendations in the 9/11 Commission's report as holy writ, and will accuse Republicans of dereliction of duty should they so much as tamper with one iota of this wisdom. Republicans, especially those in the House, want to send the President a much broader reform bill, one that goes beyond the creation of a new national intelligence director and new anti-terror agencies and that encompasses the sort of policies embodied in Sen. Jon Kyl's (R-Ariz.) "Tools to Fight Terrorism Act."

Kyl wants to give law-enforcement officials more tools with which to monitor, apprehend and incarcerate terrorists. His bill would, among other things, give anti-terror agencies authority to place suspected terrorists in pretrial detention, and allow prosecutors to safeguard confidential sources of information used to convict terrorists.

Unfortunately, we can expect Senate liberals to oppose proposals to strengthen the tools available to law enforcement and intelligence officials, and to offer amendments adding billions of dollars to various categories of homeland security spending, including ports, first responders, and chemical and nuclear plants.

Congress will face another gut check when it considers legislation that seeks to squeeze the politics and waste out of federal homeland security grants.

"Homeland security assistance," the 9/11 Commission report reads, "should be based strictly on an assessment of risks and vulnerabilities. Congress should not use this money as a pork barrel." The Chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Chris Cox, (R-Calif.) and his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Rep. Jim Turner, D-Tex.), introduced the "Faster and Smarter Funding for First Responders Act," which the House is expected to consider this week.

Current law requires the Department of Homeland Security to distribute the vast majority of funding for first responders according to an arbitrary political formula--one riddled with bureaucratic inertia. These funds end up disproportionately in areas with no discernable terrorist targets and, not surprisingly, officials in those areas don't know what to do with the funds. Remarkably, more than $5.2 billion that Congress appropriated in 2003 remains stuck in the bureaucratic pipeline.

The Cox-Turner legislation would make the distribution of anti-terrorist funding contingent on criteria such as risk and actual need. Yet the Cox bill has attracted strong bipartisan opposition from vested interests. Members who represent low-risk rural areas that have benefited from the current formula have been especially vocal in their opposition. Cox already has made minor concessions, but the integrity of his approach remains intact. The debate on this legislation will present those members of Congress whose "business as usual" mindset extends to homeland security programs with an opportunity to replace their petty, pork-barrel perspective with a national, security-first one.

It's good to see Congress moving on this important issue before the election. But the jury's still out on whether members will get it right. Stay tuned.

Mr. Franc, who has held a number of positions on Capitol Hill, is vice president of Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation.