With Secretary Ridge warning of “credible” reporting that Al Qaeda is planning a large-scale terrorist attack on America between now and the election, you’d think that the Republican Party would want to rally behind President Bush’s plan to defeat the terrorists. Apparently not, if a vote Wednesday in the House of Representatives is any indication.

Mr. Bush laid out the connection between freedom and democracy abroad and American security at home in a November 2003 speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo,” Mr. Bush said.”Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.”

Mr. Bush elaborated this strategy in his January State of the Union address, when he said,”As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends.” He said,”I will send you a proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labor unions in the Middle East.”

Mr. Bush’s proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy met an unhappy fate on the floor of the House Wednesday. A congressional appropriations subcommittee had already slashed the president’s proposed budget for the endowment to $51 million from $80 million. On Wednesday, the House cut even more, taking more than $10 million from the National Endowment for Democracy budget and diverting it to that bulwark of defense against the Islamic terrorists, the Small Business Administration, in order to subsidize the 7(a) loan program.

That leaves the National Endowment for Democracy with funding that “does not even maintain a level at the inflation rate,” as Rep. David Drier, a Republican of California, noted during congressional debate. While the president promised to double the current budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, the House of Representatives wasn’t even willing to preserve it.

We aren’t talking large sums of money by Washington standards. The $40 million proposed budget increase for the National Endowment for Democracy is one seventh of the cost of a B1-B bomber. Yet by funding fax machines, secretaries, and offices for democracy and freedom advocates overseas, the National Endowment for Democracy’s work can help avert the need for America to send our military into action.

Who is to blame for the House vote? The Democrats, led by New York City’s own Rep. Nydia Velazquez, provided most of the “ayes” in the 281 to 137 roll call that stripped the National Endowment of its latest $10 million. But fully 87 Republicans in the Republican-controlled House crossed party lines to undermine Mr. Bush’s agenda in the war on terror. They included some who know better, including Rep. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico. The two Democrats who supported the NED funding, Rep. Howard Berman of California and Rep. James Moran of Virginia, deserve a tip of the hat.

Another villain of this story was the banking industry, seeking to sustain a subsidy for lending that not even the Small Business Administration itself wants to maintain. “A zero subsidy for the 7(a) loan program is not only good for the American taxpayer, but for the stability of the program,” the administrator of the SBA, Hector Barreto, wrote in a letter to Congress. Without the subsidy, the program would still provide an unprecedented $12.5 billion in loans.

As the Capitol Hill newspaper the Hill reported yesterday, several bankers are encouraging their colleagues to contribute to Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign.”Just think what the SBA loan programs puts in our pockets!” wrote Deryl Schuster of Business Loan Express, a lending company that participates in the 7(a) program, in an e-mail to other fellow lenders. Mr. Schuster also noted that Robert Tannenhauser, the CEO of Business Loan Express, sits on Mr. Kerry’s fund-raising committee: “We would like to get at least the $100,000 mark which would give the 7(a) industry incredible visibility with Mr. Kerry and his campaign committee,” Mr. Schuster wrote.

The House vote was particularly ill-timed because it came on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the student protests that revived Iran’s pro-democracy movement. On July 9, 1999, 25,000 Iranians began a week of protests against their theocratic regime, the largest political demonstration since the Islamic revolution in 1979. This year, however, Iran’s tyrannical mullahs shut down Tehran University in anticipation of the anniversary, and a number of student demonstrators remain in prison. In recent years, government goons have broken up anniversary rallies.

There were some voices of sanity that emerged during the House debate.”This is crazy,” said Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut.

“If ever there was a time we needed public diplomacy, we need the services of the National Endowment for Democracy to help tell the truth about America throughout the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, it is now,” said Rep. Henry Hyde, the chairman of the International Relations Committee. “This is not the time to be cutting these funds.”

Here’s hoping that Mr. Hyde’s view prevails as this appropriations bill makes its way through Congress, and that the Senate restores the president’s full budget request for what Mr. Bush calls his “forward strategy of freedom.”