The 9-11 Commission has spoken, and Congress faces a stern test of its ability to raise national welfare above the political motivations of a presidential election year.

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee took an encouraging first step, announcing it will get right to work on two of the 9-11 report’s prime recommendations. Starting the first week of August – when members expected to be on recess and, in many cases, campaigning for re-election – the committee will open hearings on proposals to create a National Counter Intelligence Center and to establish a lone national intelligence director in the executive branch.

There are various reasons for skepticism.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has already said he doubts there is time to produce such legislation by the Oct. 1 deadline the Senate committee set for itself.

The systemic obstacles are even greater. The national intelligence director envisioned by the 9-11 commission represents a significant consolidation of political turf under one person with expanded authority to oversee budgets and appoint officials. The National Counter Intelligence Center would be an amalgamation of some 15 federal agencies with national security roles.

Such notions won’t be greeted warmly by those who stand to lose influence. The power struggles could be titan.

On top of that, all 435 House seats, a third of the Senate and the presidency are up for election this fall. The temptation for candidates to leverage 9-11 findings for their own political advantage could be irresistible.

For inspiration, the nation should look to the commission itself. Its members all were people with clear political leanings, yet they agreed to find consensus rather than divide along party lines. They declined to say the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could have been avoided, but they pointed bluntly to failings under both the Clinton and Bush administrations to grasp a decade of warnings that Islamic terrorists were up o something big.

“Ten commissioners – five Republicans and five Democrats – chosen by elected leaders from our nation’s capital at a time of great partisan division – have come together to present this report without dissent,” their report states in its executive summary.

Clearly, the commission members have some pride of authorship. Their recommendations, once scrutinized, may be found wanting for legitimate reasons. But the urgency with which the report voiced them is indisputable.

Congress needs not only to move expeditiously on the hearings already announced, but also to take up the balance of the commission’s suggestions, including an overhaul of Congress’ own oversight role in security matters.

It became apparent during the commission’s hearings that the nation’s security structure is badly fragmented. The 9-11 report documented unmistakably that agencies – sometimes hampered by interdepartmental rivalries – couldn’t assemble the things they knew separately into a comprehensive picture.

Now that we know, beyond question, what our intelligence specialists didn’t detect before 9-11, Americans deserve a non-partisan determination by their elected leaders to bring our national security apparatus up to date. Citizens have a duty, too. If the politicians can’t resist gamesmanship, we need to insist – in the questions we ask them, in the way we respond to their campaigns and, ultimately, in the way we vote – that they act strictly in the national interest.