Goaded by new breaches of security at airports and an increasingly impatient White House, Congress on Tuesday began choosing negotiators to forge an aviation security bill both chambers can pass as soon as possible. 
House Speaker Dennis Hastert named the House members of a conference committee -- five Republicans and three Democrats -- charged with ending the House-Senate feud over whether thousands of airport security workers should be put on government payrolls. 
The House also passed a motion instructing the conferees to "make every effort to resolve all differences between the two houses as soon as possible, and no later than Friday, Nov 9." 
Hastert, an Illinois Republican, has said he wants legislation at the latest by Thanksgiving, when Americans normally fly in large numbers. 
But the Senate went home for the day without announcing its conferees, prompting one House Republican leadership aide to charge that "the Senate is slow-walking this thing". 
Aides to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle rejected the charge and said the South Dakota Democrat would name the Senate conferees soon -- perhaps Wednesday. 
President Bush urged Congress to get moving on the issue. But lawmakers appeared as divided as ever on how to make flying safer after an incident at a Chicago airport in which a man got past screeners with knives and a stun gun in his carry-on bags. 
"There is what I call a hardening of the attitudes on this," House Republican Leader Richard Armey said. 
Last week the House voted largely along partly lines to pass a Republican bill, backed by Bush, to increase federal oversight of airport security -- but without making the security workers government employees, as the Senate had voted unanimously to do last month. 
The differences must be resolved by a conference committee and any compromises it produces must pass both chambers before President Bush can sign it into law. 
Lawmakers argued vociferously over the implications of the weekend incident at Chicago's O'Hare airport, where Argenbright Security Inc. provides airport security services. 
Democrats said it demonstrated that private companies should no longer do baggage screening. "I can't understand how we can be so nonchalant about what happened over the weekend," said Rep. James Moran, Democrat of Virginia. 
"We find this Indian Jones character with knives, with stun guns, Mace, getting onto a plane, having gone through the same Argenbright security system, the same system that the House would entrust the security of the public," he said. 
But Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican and co-sponsor of the House bill, responded "we all agree that the current system doesn't work" and needed better federal oversight. 
The real issue was whether "the American people want a huge bureaucracy or do they want aviation security," Mica said. 
The White House urged Congress to compromise. 
"The president believes that the best system is a mix of public and private screeners ... The president sees a compromise that can be reached," spokesman Ari Fleischer said. 
"The president is calling on Congress to get it done." While the House bill keeps airport security workers in the private sector, it also gives the president the choice of moving some of them into the public sector if he sees fit. 
Republicans said this was offered as a compromise on the issue but Democrats rejected it as a fudge, claiming Bush would never in fact do it. 
The argument over how to improve airport security stretches back to Sept. 11, when hijacked airliners crashed into the Pentagon near Washington and New York's World Trade Center. 
The bill the House passed last week included an amendment that would extend protection against crippling lawsuits over Sept. 11 to everyone from Boeing Corp. to the landlord of the World Trade Center leveled in the attacks. 
But Armey said Tuesday that the conferees would consider whether amendments like the liability limit were "germane." 
The conferees named by Hastert were all members of the Transportation Committee. The Republicans were Chairman Don Young of Alaska; John Mica of Florida, the aviation subcommittee chairman; Tom Petri of Wisconsin; James Duncan of Tennessee; and Vernon Ehlers of Michigan. 
The Democrats were James Oberstar of Minnesota; William Lipinski of Illinois; and Peter DeFazio of Oregon.