AT WAR - Screen Test: The fight over airport security.

It seems odd to say, but the way John Mica sees it, the anthrax scare on Capitol Hill helped the Republican aviation-security bill pass the House. The GOP bill called for a new safety system in which the nation's 28,000 airport baggage screeners would be private contractors working under strict federal supervision-as opposed to the Senate bill, which called for all screeners to be federal employees. Mica, a Florida Republican who chairs the House aviation subcommittee, had carefully studied the issue but was having trouble getting his colleagues to take the time to learn why private was better. "We were losing the battle," he says, but then came the anthrax threat. "When members were forced out of their offices, with people on the House floor, we had a chance to sit down and discuss." The bill passed.

If only Mica and his allies had had the chance to make one-on-one presentations to the American people. Instead, the public saw GOP leaders who seemed determined to make the worst possible case for private baggage screeners. House majority leader Dick Armey, for example, sometimes seemed to spend less time discussing air security than flailing away at the opposition. "What the Democrats want is 30,000 new dues-paying contributors," Armey said on October 14, adding later that the Democratic plan was designed to create new members of "the federal union that happens also to be their most generous single contributor to their campaign."

Republicans working on the bill winced. "It was terrible," says one GOP aide. And it wasn't just that pronouncements like Armey's were bad PR, sending the message that Republicans cared more about making political points than about airport safety. They also obscured the fact that Mica, House Transportation Committee chairman Don Young, and others in the GOP were working hard to find the best policy on aviation security.

They read reports on the subject. They held open hearings. They held closed hearings (to discuss classified information). They met with a wide variety of experts. And as they listened and read, they came up with the plan that became their bill.

Contrary to much of what has been written about it in the press, the Republican plan doesn't call for a totally private screening force. Rather, it calls for private screeners working under intense federal supervision and constant testing. Maintaining that level of scrutiny will require lots of new federal workers-the supervisors and testers-so that some 25 percent of the "private" force will be government employees. But the bill doesn't mandate precisely how many, instead giving that authority to the president and the newly created undersecretary of transportation for security.

There's also been some misunderstanding about who those private contractors will work for. They now work for the airlines, who hired the lowest bidders without great concern for the quality of their work; under the House plan, they will be hired by the federal government- which means that the much-debated difference between the House and Senate proposals is between one bill that would make all screeners federal government employees and another bill that would make them private contractors working for the federal government.

The difference might seem small, but to many experts, it's important. House members and staff talked extensively to European and Israeli security officials and found that some countries had tried a fully federalized security force but found it unworkable. Many of those countries now use a public/private mix similar to what Republicans proposed in the House. "We just tried to pick the best of what everybody else had done and tried not to make the mistakes that both we and they had made," says Mica.