Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, wary of giving Democrats an opportunity to revisit contentious issues relating to the Iraq War, is not going to bring an intelligence authorization bill to the floor this month and may shelve the measure entirely, senior leadership aides say.

Frist has decided not to put the fiscal 2007 authorization bill — a potential Pandora’s box for Republicans in the run-up to the November midterm elections — on the September calendar, the aides said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee approved the bill (S 3237), 15-0, in May, and the Armed Services panel gave its approval in an undisclosed vote a month later.

If the bill does not come to the floor before the end of the year — a possibility that looks increasingly likely — it would mark the second year in a row that the Republicans have shied away from completing the legislation after an unbroken skein that began in 1978.

Like last year, Senate Democrats are prepared to push amendments that would demand that President Bush give Congress closely held information on the Iraq War and his terror suspect detention practices. But Frist does not want to give them the platform to do so, because he considers a rehash of the war to be a waste of the Senate’s time, according to the Tennessee Republican’s chief of staff.

The failure to pass an authorization bill for two consecutive years would further neuter the Intelligence panels.Without it, the House and Senate committees would have no say in providing the intelligence community with strategic and financial guidance.

In the past, for example, intelligence authorizers have called for cutting the budgets for certain spy satellite programs and boosting spending on human spies. Without an authorization measure, such policy decisions would fall to military appropriators, who determine the intelligence community’s budget in a classified portion of the annual Defense appropriations bill.

“They have only one major tool with which to get oversight done,” said Denis McDonough, who recently wrote a report critical of congressional oversight of intelligence as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “That’s this bill.”

The Senate’s bill would require, for the first time, disclosure of the total intelligence community budget; grant new arrest powers to the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA); and clarify that every Intelligence Committee member should receive briefings on all intelligence matters.

A bill (HR 5020), passed by the House in April, included provisions that also would expand the arrest powers of the CIA and NSA; limit the growth of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; and require the director to study the possibility of revoking the pensions of members of the intelligence community who disclose classified information.

Last year, according to Democrats, a Senate Republican put an anonymous hold on the fiscal 2006 measure (S 1803) in order to block Democratic amendments dealing with prewar Iraq intelligence and the detention of terror suspects.

One Democratic amendment that stalled the bill last year would require the administration to provide Congress with the president’s daily intelligence briefings that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., offered that amendment in response to Bush’s claims that lawmakers had access to the same intelligence as administration officials. And Kennedy’s office said he still wants to see the amendment adopted.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., agreed late last year to accept Kennedy’s amendment, as well as several others, in hopes of pushing the bill through by unanimous consent.

Another disputed amendment from last year that would have required reports on clandestine CIA prisons was adopted during Senate committee consideration, but other Democratic amendments on the detention policies of the administration could resurface during any floor debate.

Leaders of the Senate Intelligence panel said they have no desire to go a second straight year without an authorization bill.

“As chairman, I want the Senate to move this bill,” Roberts said in a statement. “The annual authorization bill is an important part of our oversight of the nation’s intelligence activities.”

“It is absolutely stunning not to pass an intelligence authorization bill — the committee’s blueprint for the entire intel community — for two years in a row,” said John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat. Without such a bill, he said, “the Intelligence committees have no ability to put their imprint on intelligence activities, and certainly no mechanism for enforcing it.”

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Republican-controlled Senate was worried about having a serious debate about the Bush record of failure and mismanagement of national security.” He pointed to a floor discussion in July where Reid asked Frist to enter into talks on a “very short time agreement” on the bill. But after agreeing to do so, Frist has not returned with a proposal, Manley said.

But a top leadership aide accused Democrats of seeking to divert any debate over the intelligence bill into a partisan attack on the administration’s Iraq policy.

“Unfortunately, Reid and many of his Democratic colleagues want to take the bill off-track and rehash fights over an Iraq War authorized with their votes four years ago,” said Eric Ueland, Frist’s chief of staff. “It just wastes the Senate’s time in the face of an Intelligence Committee up to its hipwaders in Iraq prewar intelligence and its uses. When it comes to national security for now and the future, the Senate can do better than what Harry Reid’s minority offers.”

The dispute over amendments and the dwindling legislative calendar has prompted Roberts to seek a Senate vote on the intelligence bill without any floor debate whatsoever. “If my colleagues are serious about intelligence oversight, the Senate should pass this bill by unanimous consent,” Roberts said. “I hope the Senate will do that sometime in September.”