They should be finished and back home well before Thanksgiving. Left behind will be thousands of bills that never were enacted and will die when the final gavel falls on the post-election session.

Most of the measures sponsored by Utah's five federal lawmakers during the past two years will be in the dead pile, from land swaps and immigration reforms to nuclear testing limitations and heritage tourism designations.

Some provisions of Utah-sponsored legislation were woven into other sponsors' bills or tucked into spending authorizations. But less than a dozen of the 191 original bills, resolutions and amendments sponsored by members of the state's congressional delegation were signed into law thus far, according to Library of Congress records.

Sen. Orrin Hatch chalked up five successful bills, including tougher laws on sexual exploitation of children. Third District Rep. Chris Cannon had four bills signed into law, including turning over federally owned water supply facilities on the Provo River to local authorities. Sen. Bob Bennett and 1st District Rep. Rob Bishop each sponsored a successful bill to adjust the boundaries of the Mt. Naomi Wilderness Area. And 2nd District Rep. Jim Matheson, the state's lone Democrat in Congress, struck out on getting any bills he sponsored passed, although his resolution honoring retired Utah Jazz star John Stockton cleared the House on a voice vote.

Congressional veterans say those low success rates are typical.

"Everybody knows from the outset that most of the bills they introduce aren't going anywhere," says former Congressman Bill Frenzel, a Republican who represented Minnesota in the U.S. House from 1971 to 1991 and is now a scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

"Members introduce bills to prove their bona fides to voters, to show they really mean it," said Frenzel. "But they know that any bill that isn't introduced by a committee chairman or sought by the president has a very small chance of ever achieving passage."

Bills languish in committee files for more than a year, only to be resurrected near session's end in the most obscure and unrelated measures, tacked on by a member who is determined to push it through. Other members carpet-bomb committees with multiple bills, hoping just one will get scheduled for a hearing.

Some chairmen invent rules to stave off pestering by lawmakers who want their bills acted upon, such as requiring a minimum number of co-sponsors. In the House, 218 co-sponsors is a common trigger point. But most of the time, lawmakers without seniority, majority party affiliation or a chairmanship have little hope after dropping their bill in the "hopper," a wooden box at the side of the rostrum in the House, or presenting it to a clerk in the Senate.

Barring any last-minute effort to hang them on the huge omnibus appropriations measure during this lame-duck session, here are some bills sponsored by Utah lawmakers likely to die with the end of the 108th Congress:

l Arnold Amendment: Hatch's call to strike the constitutional ban on foreign-born citizens being elected U.S. president didn't get a single co-sponsor, but he held a hearing anyway with a panel of scholars, most of whom said the prohibition was archaic. The resolution's biggest potential beneficiary, California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently endorsed Hatch's proposal and "Amend for Arnold" bumper stickers have been spotted in the Golden State.

l Ban on burning the U.S. flag: Hatch's perennial proposed amendment to the Constitution picked up 56 co-sponsors this session. After it cleared his Senate Judiciary Committee by a party line 11-7 vote in July, he said GOP Senate leaders promised him a September or October floor vote. The vote never came and his 10th attempt in 15 years to prohibit flag desecration appears to have gone up in smoke.

l Nuclear testing restrictions: Matheson's bill to require new public health safeguards and environmental studies before resumption of underground detonations at the Nevada Test Site became mired in cross-jurisdictional claims by the Armed Services, Energy and Resources committees in the House. Bennett's version, which included additional hurdles to resumed testing, was referred to the Energy and Natural Resources committee, of which he is not a member.

l Test range wilderness: Bishop's proposal to carve a federal wilderness area under the Utah Test and Training Range to effectively block rail shipments to a proposed nuclear waste dump on the Goshute Indian Reservation cleared committee and made it to the House calendar, but has yet to be scheduled for vote. Attempts to insert it into the 2005 defense appropriations bill failed, although Bishop has vowed to continue fighting for it.

l DREAM Act: Hatch's bill to let states determine if children of illegal immigrants receive in-state college tuition discounts cleared his Judiciary Committee with broad bipartisan support in 2003. But it was never put on the calendar for a floor vote, reportedly because of White House opposition. Hatch recently inserted the bill language into the unpassed budget authorization for the Department of Justice in a last-ditch effort to make it law. In the House, Cannon's version collected 149 co-sponsors, but failed to clear a subcommittee because of GOP divisions.

l AgJobs: Another Cannon bipartisan immigration reform measure authorizing a program for illegal immigrants to rectify their status in the United States by working in farm labor picked up 125 sponsors. But it stalled in the immigration subcommittee when chairman Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., called it amnesty for lawbreakers. Following Cabinet-level talks with Mexican leaders last week, the Bush administration said guest worker immigration reform is likely to come from the White House next year.

l National Mormon Pioneer Heritage Area: Bennett's proposal to create a tourism-boosting corridor from Thistle to Kanab skidded to a stop in the Senate Energy committee last year. It hasn't budged, in part because Chairman Sen. Craig Thomas of Wyoming has an aversion to creating new federal park units without dedicated funding.

l Trail of the Ancients: Hatch's similar tourism byway designation study for 710 miles of roads in the Four Corners area received a hearing but failed to move on. Another Hatch bill to study alternate routes of the Pony Express, Oregon, California and Mormon Pioneer national historic trails also stalled after energy industry officials expressed concern more trails would limit oil and gas development on public lands.

l Bear River Refuge visitor center: Bishop's bill authorizing $11 million for the Interior Department to build an education center at the migratory bird refuge in Box Elder County has sat parked in a House subcommittee since February 2003.

l Desert tortoise habitat compensation: Bennett added $1 million to the as-yet-unpassed 2005 Interior Department appropriation for Washington County to acquire desert tortoise habitat. But interest in his bill to give southern Utah landowner Jim Doyle a $15 million down payment on 1,300 acres the federal government says can't be developed because it's home to the endangered species dried up after the Bureau of Land Management said the proposal was more than the agency's entire national budget for land acquisition.

l Virgin River dinosaur footprints: Matheson's bill to give the city of St. George additional spending options for a previously approved $500,000 federal grant to purchase private land containing thousands of fossilized dinosaur tracks died in a House subcommittee.

l Reservation roads: Matheson's measure to hike spending on Indian reservation roads from the Highway Trust Fund stalled in a House subcommittee, but similar bills in the Senate advanced and could be rolled into a forthcoming federal highway reauthorization bill next year.

l Minersville State Park: Hatch's bill to transfer about 200 acres of federal land that had been a state park to Beaver County cleared the Senate in September but has been sitting in a House Resources subcommittee. Cannon is a member of the committee, but his identical bill is also lodged in the Resource panel's files.

l Asbestos litigation reform: Hatch held marathon markup sessions in his judiciary committee in 2003 to forge his $153 billion trust fund plan to compensate victims of asbestos-related injuries and end a crush of lawsuits. But some businesses and insurers were unhappy with the cost and another year's worth of negotiations by Senate leadership didn't produce a final bill. The defeat of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle last week caused stocks in companies with asbestos liabilities to rise on speculation a trust fund bill will now pass Congress. Cannon's version of asbestos reform legislation didn't move out of the House Judiciary Committee.